Not The Doctor
by PharaonicWolf
Summary: In which Q tests the bars of his cage, Holly protects what's precious to her, and Bond turns his craft against his fellows to catch a more dangerous man doing the same. Q/OC, Q-Branch-centric. Sequel to "All the Kids Have Always Known."
1. I've Just Seen a Face

"This _is _a story of boy meets girl, but you should know up front: this is not a love story."  
- _(500) Days of Summer_

**Author's Notes:**

Welcome back to my Less Painfully Caged 'verse. If you're wondering where Q got his scars, or why MI6 bugs his flat, I suggest you read "All the Kids Have Always Known." If you're wondering about this mysterious "Holly" who Q treats as his second brain/best mate/surrogate mum, I suggest you read "Timshel."

I hope you enjoy the ride.

* * *

I awake to see that no one is free  
We're all fugitives, look at the way we live  
Down here I cannot sleep from fear, no  
I said which way do I turn  
Oh, I forget everything I've learned

And the spies came out of the water  
But you're feeling so bad 'cause you know  
But the spies hide out in every corner  
But you can't touch them, no  
'Cause they're all spies  
They're all spies

- Coldplay, "Spies"

* * *

**1. I've Just Seen a Face**

It happened so gradually, so insidiously, that for some time Bond was unaware that anything was amiss.

The first hint was an air of distraction buzzing like gnats through the upper echelons of Q-branch. Moneypenny said that M had tried to send Q on ten days' leave after his abduction and torture at the hands of Colin Burns, but the Quartermaster stayed away for only three days, which was as long as they could reasonably imprison him in Medical. Bond suspected that Holly Mason had intervened; she was meddlesome enough, and firm enough in her convictions, and she understood that what M saw as mercy Q would interpret as punishment. But a man didn't come back from that unscarred (and he had seen them, had cleaned the wounds that would serve as a reminder and watched Q's eyes bleed betrayal), and at first Bond thought that the distractions all originated in Q, that the others were watching him, just in case.

"…Something you need, 007?"

Q's eyes seemed drawn to his computer screen like electrons to a charged atom; he could only pull them away for a few seconds at a time.

"I'll be on a plane to Libya in two hours. I assume you have something to give me?"

"Oh. Yes." Q slid open a drawer with the hand not steering his mouse. "Your Walther – your _fourth_ Walther, actually, do try to bring it back intact this time – radio, communicator, sunglasses with camera." A dialog box popped up on a wall-mounted monitor, and Q typed without looking. "I assume you've already seen Raj for your documentation?"

He hadn't, actually; it was easy to forget that such things were required when one never had to expend any effort to obtain them. Bond took his toybox from the drawer but made no motion to leave. "Pressing project?"

"Mmm. Very." Q's face had tightened into a pressed-lip, tensed-eyelid frown. "Fixing a fault in the machine. We wouldn't want another Silva, would we?"

That should have been a warning: Q never talked about Silva, and it was the things Q never talked about that mattered the most.

* * *

The second hint dropped when the mission in Libya went to hell on day five and it wasn't Q who said, "Good evening, 007" over the comm link.

Bond cocked his head. "Holly?"

"Speaking. Lovely to hear from you again, Mr. Bond."

"Likewise. Where's Q?"

"You picked a bad time to blow your cover – he's tied up at the moment." A sharp pause, then: "Considering the last time I was the voice in your ear was when you were rescuing him from kidnappers, I want to make it clear that I didn't mean that literally."

Bond would have chuckled if he had the breath; he had just avoided a sniper and two on-foot pursuers by ducking into a textile shop, forcing his way to the second floor, and making a series of astronaut-like leaps along the rooftops of the adjacent buildings, before using a brittle and folding fire escape to set himself down a kilometer away from anyone who might want to kill him – he hoped.

"At any rate," Holly was saying, "I'm more than qualified to offer the same level of tech support, guidance, and sarcasm that he would provide."

She couldn't see his smile, but he knew it spread to his voice. "I trust you."

He could hear her smiling too. "That's good to know – now, let's get started."

They managed to clean up Libya with only three or four skulls and gadgets broken, and Bond rewarded himself with a week on a Mediterranean island in the company of a woman who never expected him to do anything but leave, who in fact wanted it, because her distasteful husband had been among Bond's prey and his assets now belonged to her alone.

* * *

Confirmation finally came when Bond delivered his Libya report to M's desk and received only a fraction of the expected satisfaction.

"Welcome back, Mr. Bond." The greeting was sincere, but Mallory was drowning too deep in some urgency to derive pleasure from anything except a solution. "Clean work over there, though I wish you hadn't shot the ambassador's husband – the CIA is mortified."

"He was pointing a gun at his own wife," Bond explained with a tiny shrug, "and she's a much better asset that he is."

"I'm sure." M cocked a wry eyebrow, and Bond almost smiled. Then the moment evaporated; Mallory flipped distractedly through Bond's report and tossed the folder aside. His face had acquired deeper lines in the past two weeks.

"Before I send you off on another mission," he said, leaning forward on his elbows and lacing his fingers on the desk, "I need you to report to Robison for a debriefing on the Colin Burns incident."

Bond frowned. "I've already been debriefed, sir, and I filed an official report. And I was under the impression –" He searched Mallory's face. "– that Burns's trial has already concluded, that he was found guilty on all counts, and that there was nothing more left to be said."

"In most ways you are correct," M conceded, though he didn't sound pleased. "However, there is still a serious unanswered question about the matter – namely, how the kidnapper, Mr. Rafferty, knew when and where the Quartermaster would be out in the field. Under questioning he has admitted that he and his little gang of counterfeiters received a tip from an anonymous source that their drop would be tailed by a team from MI6. This source leaked him pictures of everyone involved –"

"– And he recognized Q as the person that Burns was looking for," Bond supplied.

"Yes. Mr. Burns had been circulating an old picture of Q in some of the… darker corners of the internet, with a reward for anyone who could put the two of them in contact. Rafferty decided to abandon his companions and collect a reward that he wouldn't have to split three ways. His source had not provided him with the names or ranks of anyone on his tail, so he had no idea that he had just kidnapped someone MI6 might tear apart London to find."

Some would find the reassurance of rescue encouraging, Bond thought, but beneath M's glowering brow there was no comfort or warmth, only a steely pragmatism. Taking a man might be permitted; taking a valuable resource, property of the Commonwealth, would not.

"Rafferty claims not to be able to identify his anonymous source. Apparently the source was never in contact with him directly, only his employer." Mallory slid an eight-by-ten headshot across the desk to Bond. The man depicted had a round face and high cheekbones, dark hair slicked back from a broad forehead, handsomeness marred by a cocksure grin. "Douglas Zims. Worldwide counterfeiter of currency and pharmaceuticals. He's been known to us for nearly a decade, but he's a hard man to pin down – he has multiple safehouses on four different continents. And he was born in China to a Chinese mother, which means he's a national, so we'll never get extradition if he chooses to hide out there."

"And he's got a mole in MI6," Bond muttered. "Bet he feels like the world's at his feet."

M gave him a grim smile, the kind that wasn't a smile but a reflex. "The mole doesn't belong to Zims alone. He's quite mercenary. Since the first of the year eleven of our agents in seven different countries have been compromised in the field. Fortunately none of our people have been killed, but we've lost important contacts and I doubt our luck will hold much longer. We need to pursue any possible lead." He dropped his voice, for Bond's ears only: "That's why I need you to go over, again, all the details of the Colin Burns incident. Anything could be helpful – anything Burns or Rafferty said, anything you saw in the Quartermaster's flat –"

There it was, the key to the code, the truth about who they were really spying on, and why: "He's a suspect."

M did not have to clarify the pronoun. "Q-Branch provides the software that secures MI6's databases. _Everyone_ in his department is a suspect, Mr. Bond." His eyes left Bond for the barest instant, shot to the closed door and bounced back. "And you must admit history is not on his side."

But Mallory had not been there to witness the shutter snap of Q's emotions, the way he could never quite hide behind blinks and barbed words and glare. The kid had control, but he was no actor. "You saw what they did to him."

That made M's mask slip, and Bond could tell that his next sentence was much more tired and much less stern than he meant it to be. "I am considering every scenario, no matter how unlikely." Then he smiled, wire-thin, a misjudged attempt to break the tension. "For some impenetrable reason, he seems to like you. So I also want you to keep an eye on Q-Branch. I'd like someone with an outside perspective to report back to me on the general tone of operations. Right now Q-Branch is potentially our greatest enemy _and_ our greatest ally. I'll sleep better if someone of your experience can judge which is which."

Bond nodded, because that was the only acceptable response, then thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned to leave without permission, because that was the only way to express his displeasure. Mallory's voice followed him to the door.

"It's possible your exposure in Libya was also orchestrated by the mole. If you were a lesser agent we would almost certainly have lost you. Keep that in mind."

Bond had been playing this game long enough to know the answer right away.

"Good thing I'm not a lesser agent."

* * *

It happened so gradually, so gently, that for some time Q was unaware it was even happening at all.

Despite his best intentions he had developed a routine: Charing Corner Coffee right at the six a.m. opening, Dirty Chai and two servings of tea biscuits, usually a corner table, or by a window if he could get it. For years he had walked past the shop every day on his way to the Tube and never gone inside. Then the Skyfall incident earned him six weeks with nothing to do but not sleep and not call Holly Mason and stare at the crawling figures in the cracking paint of his flat, until he realized that London did not sleep either and he should not waste or ignore this most beautiful cage. Among its public he felt comfortably anonymous; few people asked questions or demanded explanations, and if any strangers came to recognize him, politeness usually held them back from acknowledgement.

When he returned to active duty he thought occasionally about giving up the morning coffee, because routines were anathema to evolution. But the atmosphere put him in a particular contemplative mood that seemed to serve his work, and it was an interesting exercise in probability and prediction to observe the same set of people in the same shop at the same time every day. They were like the cast of a telly programme, charming in their familiarity: The impatient businessman, who tapped his foot every time he had to stand still and wielded his mobile like an extension of his arm. The schoolteacher, handbag the size of a holdall and clay earrings that matched the season (apples for autumn, snowflakes for winter). The old man, maybe a retired professor, ensconced in the window with wire-rimmed spectacles and the _Evening Standard_. The mother and son, three days a week, latte for mum and a blueberry scone for the boy (Q worried, a little, when they did not show up). The King's College London girls, always in ponytails (one red, one blond), who carried IDs from St. Thomas's and leaned their heads together over books with color photos of vivisected lungs and livers and hearts.

Q had a minor interest in the King's College London girls, because they were intelligent and animated and close to his own age and very, very attractive. The blonde read Sartre and Hannah Arendt. The redhead had a habit of slipping her shoes off under the table and curling her feet beneath her on the bench, and she wore her keys on a long silver chain around her neck beside a plastic model of the TARDIS. Occasionally Q caught them looking at him, and when their eyes met the girls would turn away and giggle behind their hands. Q didn't date, and he certainly wasn't sixteen anymore, to hang his self-worth on the attentions of attractive people, but he did enjoy having his ego stroked sometimes.

Then he ran late one morning in February and joined the queue right behind the pair of them, swiping his thumbs across his glasses like windshield wipers to clean off the steam. The blonde had on a white knit hat with a rainbow pompom, while the redhead had wrapped herself in a monstrous scarf in clashing colors. It took Q an embarrassingly long time to figure out where he had seen that scarf before.

When the blonde moved away to claim a table and the redhead stepped up to the counter, Q leaned close to her ear and said, "Nice Tom Baker scarf." She didn't wear perfume, but her hair smelled of citrus and he had to check a sudden impulse to inhale deeply.

He had startled her, but she smiled. "He's my favorite Doctor. Not my first, but my favorite."

"You're a little young for Tom Baker, aren't you?" Classic Q-Branch – the older members fixated on age as a subject for teasing, and Q had started to adopt the same attitude around the interns. It was hazing and he should feel ashamed – _should_.

But the redhead wasn't one of his interns. For a moment he froze, afraid she'd feel patronized, but instead she nudged him playfully with her elbow. "Look who's talking."

They smiled at each other and went to their separate tables and by nine a.m. Q was up to his ears in a particularly vexing agent extraction and had forgotten, mostly, about the redheaded girl from St. Thomas's with the citrus shampoo and the Tom Baker scarf, and that should have been the end.

Except that it wasn't. Two days later she winked at him from her place in line when he turned around with his Dirty Chai, and he devoted a disproportionate amount of brainpower to wondering why she had done that and if she had really spared any thought for his compliment or his teasing. The following week he spotted her a fiver when he saw her fidgeting at the counter as she picked through her purse, and the day after that he came in to find his drink already paid for and a presumptuous grin on the cashier's face.

A week or so later she leaned over his shoulder while he was tinkering with a low-security Q-Branch prototype and asked, "Are you an architect?"

Q could see how she would think so; the files open on his tablet were floorplans. "No, I'm a computer programmer."

"So what are those for, then?"

"I'm writing a 3-D visualizer that builds files and then opens them for modification. Sort of like Minecraft except with more accurate physics."

She was still absorbed in his screen. "Who made those plans?"

Q quirked an eyebrow. "Here I thought you were interested in me and my work."

She rolled her eyes, but the corners of her lips twitched tellingly. "I can't talk about computers. But my brother's an architect, so I know a few cocktail-party facts about drafting."

"Well, drafting's not my specialty, but I do have a good architect among my colleagues."

"Where?"

"Hmm?"

"Where do you work?"

Enough cashiers and customer service reps and fellow bus passengers had asked this over the years that Q no longer felt any anxiety about his stock answer. "For a small software developer. We mostly do data security, but we're allowed pet projects. Some of them turn out to be quite valuable."

Normally he would have enjoyed the way her whole face became focused with interest, but he had never tested his story against a sharp person's scrutiny, and somehow he did not want to be reticent or rude.

The blonde saved him. "Stop flirting and come sit." She handed the redhead her drink and put a hand at her elbow as if to steer her away. "We've got case notes to go over."

"For St. Thomas's," Q said before he could stop himself. It wasn't a question, which confirmed exactly how much illicit attention he had been paying over the past couple of months.

She caught the implication; a sly smile slid across her face. "Full marks. What's my position at St. Thomas's, though?"

Q inclined his head and considered her over the frames of his glasses. "You went to King's College London, which means you test well, you're ambitious, and you take medicine or social status or both very seriously. But you haven't been out of medical school long, so you're not a doctor, not yet. I'd say you're doing your foundation."

As she listened, emotions kaleidoscoped across her face almost faster than he could read them: pride, surprise, indignation, amusement, always with that undercurrent of interest, interest in _him_, inexplicable and tantalizing. When he finished she was still smiling. "Top of the class."

The blonde dragged her away, giggling with mortification. "God, you're _terrible_ –"

Q couldn't whistle and he never sang, but when contentment crept up sometimes music would come with it, sentimental songs from his childhood that flowed through his mind and the rhythm of his fingers and asserted themselves in a hum. As the streets of London bloomed with spring he found himself humming much more often than he would have thought after Skyfall. The redhead kept smiling and waving and peeking at his screens and once when he ducked out to the loo he came back to find the TARDIS sketched in blue ink on his napkin, captioned _Guess who?_

Then April stormed in and Colin Burns gave him three weeks when he couldn't look in the mirror, couldn't set foot in the Tube or a pub or the coffee place because he didn't have a good excuse for the stitches in his lip and the marks of a chain at his throat. MI6 only designed excuses for the people who attracted attention.

When he did venture back, feet carrying him without conscious consent, the shop had so changed that he felt unexpectedly betrayed and a little bit frightened, as if all familiar places might have altered during his withdrawal from the world. The regulars had been displaced by a crowd of flushed middle-aged women in neon vests and bare-legged athletes with numbers plastered on their chests. Q recalled an ignored headline, an advertisement on the side of a bus – some sort of charity race starting at Hyde Park. The queue ran along the walls right up to the door, and he would have turned around and walked out if Tanner hadn't dropped a report into his inbox at exactly that moment. The crowd could be tolerated if he had the barrier of work.

He shuffled through the line automatically and it spat him out right as a couple vacated a table in the front window. Apparently the shop was attempting to appease him with offerings of prime real estate. Q accepted this karmic apology and sat for a few minutes with the report and the tea biscuits and an odd idea in the back of his mind of how normal he must look in his necktie and dress trousers, only the palest line of a scar on his lip.

"Do you mind if I sit here?"

It was the redhead, alone, some cinnamon-smelling drink in her hands, eyes darting between him and the valuable empty chair across the table.

He should tell her that yes, he minded, or, more politely, that he preferred to be alone, or, even better, that he was saving the seat for someone else.

"No, course not."

She sloughed her bag onto the floor, settled sideways in the chair with her back against the windowsill, and crossed one leg over the other, cup cradled in her hands like a baby bird. They deliberately did not look at each other, Q crunching through the report at about three-quarters his normal processing power and the redhead drinking in the crowd and her coffee as though she savored both. Q could see her foot bouncing out of the corner of his eye and wondered what was making her nervous.

"I haven't seen _you_ round here in a while."

He met her eyes over the rim of her cup and lied. "I just got back from holiday."

"Oh, where did you go?" Her face glimmered with a sly amusement that Q associated with camaraderie, the gentle teasing normally born of years of friendship. "Clearly not Brighton, you didn't tan."

"Swansea, actually. It rained."

"Does it ever _not_ rain in Swansea?"

Q flicked his eyes to the ceiling in exaggerated thought and said solemnly, "I think I saw the sun for ten minutes on Wednesday."

She matched him with a nod of mock approval. "So not a complete wash." Then she winced. "Sorry, that pun was unintentional."

Q glanced back at his mobile and discovered that he had lost interest in its contents. "I'm surprised you're not with your friend."

She sighed and drew away, and he cast about for another topic – but then she turned her body to face him as though she had reached an important decision. "We've had a… a bit of a quarrel." Her fingers wrung the cardboard sleeve on her coffee cup, but she flipped her hair back over her shoulder and looked at him with an odd defiance, _I'm-fine-really_. "She thinks it's ridiculous that I don't approve of her new boyfriend, even though he's thirty-eight and married and definitely cares more about her tits than her intelligence."

"In ascending order of importance," Q muttered, and that must have been the right thing to say, because she lit up with glee. Despite – or because of – his intelligence, Q rarely pleased people so sincerely, and he allowed himself a flash of smugness.

"_Yes_. We've gone back and forth on this so many times, and she _always_ accuses me of bringing my own baggage into it because I dated an older man a few years ago, and I keep _telling_ her that I would be saying the same thing no matter my own life occurrences, and –" She caught his eye and faltered. "– and clearly it's affecting me to the point where I tell the whole story to strangers in coffee shops."

Q smiled encouragingly, and that made two things he rarely did, in under a minute. He could not picture what the expression must look like on his face. "We're not really strangers, I don't think."

"City of eight million people and you see the same ones every day." Anyone at Six would make that thought disparaging, but in her voice it had hope, a quiet marvel at whatever gravity drew people into each other's orbits, and a hint of melancholy that he couldn't quite trace.

"My name's Audrey. Audrey Kingsolver." She offered her hand across the table. "Like Audrey Hepburn. _My Fair Lady_ is my mother's favorite film."

"Robert Shaw." It felt strange to shake the hand of someone he didn't need to know for work; Q had a vague notion that hand-shaking was for the old, not the young and flirtatious. "I don't think I'm named after anyone, though apparently there was an actor in the sixties named Robert Shaw."

"Was he talented?"

"I don't know. I've never seen any of his films."

Silence, growing thicker and harder to break with each second they allowed it to continue. Q scrolled idly down the report still called up on his mobile and tried to remember what civilians talked about in their spare time – he had never been good at this, but once upon a time he had done it quite often, and it was ridiculous that he couldn't summon a guiding memory of a time when it had gone right –

"Would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime?"

He looked up sharply. She was watching him with her chin resting on her hand and the end of a stir stick between her lips like a cigarette. The surrounding rumble of dishes and conversation and cars surged as if someone had turned up the volume, made the muteness of their table seem stark by comparison.

"If you don't want to," she said slowly, as though he were a wild animal she was trying not to scare away, "you can say no."

"It's not that I'm not flattered –"

At that she leaned away and glanced over her shoulder like an agent assessing the exit routes, and Q bit back a familiar frustration. Over the years he had learned to reconcile with most restrictions, even wrangle them to his favor (he would never have to worry about his personal expenses, never have to fly to drooping climates in the company of disagreeable agents) – but sometimes he had run up against the rules without trying, discovered consequences that he could never be assured were unintentional. _Never have anyone over to your flat, unless you want them known to MI6. Never forget that you are not who you say you are. Never put yourself in a situation that invites curiosity, or intimacy, or honesty._

Under the table he flexed his left wrist, felt phantom fingers close around it and restrain.

"I'm sorry." It was the most sincere thing he had said.

Audrey smiled without her eyes. "It's all right. Thank you for being honest." She stood up and gathered her bag. "Good to talk to you." And then she was gone.

Q automatically reached for his Chai and had brought the cup to his lips before he realized it was empty. The vacant chair faced him accusingly. Under the table he braced his foot against it, to shove it back or kick it over, displace his tethered anger onto a target that couldn't retaliate.

Inexplicably he thought of Bond, suntanned and sated, sauntering down the corridor to Mallory's office – Mallory who had daughters and a wife who stood on his arm for state events, who could soften even his stern visage into a smile. She had seen them, surely, the scars from his three months with the IRA (scars, a faithless thought reminded him, that he had earned serving his country, not as a years-late consequence of betraying it); she must comfort him, as Holly's husband did her when she told him in truncation about the trials of their office. And Q wasn't looking for a lifetime, for any sort of promise, just a sharp wit to parry his own over coffee and hot nights and sex, someone who could learn him outside of the labels he had assumed and calculate their own appraisal.

He had left the shop and was walking in the wrong direction, towards Charing Cross instead of Embankment, because she always turned right out of the shop door and walked past the window and that was the way to Charing Cross –

Surely this couldn't be part of his sentence, because he had been alone a long time before MI6 had come for him, and he was so _tired_, tired of the jokes and assumptions about inexperience, tired of looking but never touching as though other people were animals in a zoo.

He just barely made the right train, using his skinny shoulders and bony elbows to full advantage – the Tube was the one place that made him grateful for his lankiness. It took a search of two full cars before he found her, cross-legged in a seat with her mobile in her lap, ignoring the people around her like any good Londoner. Q had to clear his throat twice to get her attention, and even the shock, not entirely pleasant, that flew into her face couldn't deter him, because they had only minutes before Lambeth North and this whole exercise would be extremely embarrassing if he couldn't manage to say what he wanted.

"You thanked me for being honest, but I wasn't." She was staring at him like she doubted his sanity. Q suddenly wished that he had spent less time justifying this to himself and more time planning his phrasing. "The truth is that I had several good reasons to say no, the most important being that I have a demanding job with inflexible hours and I haven't done this in a long time because of said job and I'm somewhat nervous, but I actually would very much like to take you to dinner and I have a meeting on Thursday at seven that I can cancel if you are free."

A pause. Audrey looked up and down the length of the car as though she found something about their surroundings spectacular. "Did you… _follow_ me onto the Tube just to tell me that?"

"Is that flattering or inappropriate?" Q asked, because he genuinely didn't know.

That reply hadn't been on her register, and she rewarded him with a long, evaluating look. Finally she said, with a curious smile, "I haven't decided yet. It depends on the character of the man."

"Well, I think you need more data before you can arrive at a valid conclusion."

"Appealing to me as a woman of science." The smile widened. "Give me your mobile."

Impossible, because although Q was confident in his locking of each individual app, one blunder could wipe several months' worth of state secrets. Audrey saw his hesitation and gave an impatient huff, belied somewhat by the amusement in her eyes.

"Give me your hand, then."

In the jostling crush Q didn't dare let go of the hanging strap with both hands, so he tugged off his right glove with his teeth – Audrey's eyebrows went up speculatively – and proffered bare skin. As she wrote she steadied his hand in hers against the rocking of the train, and the hairs stood on Q's nape as he felt, instead of saw, the way she formed her numbers.

They slid into Lambeth North. Audrey snapped the pen cap and said, "Text me first," and swung easily off the train.

Q got off at Elephant & Castle and took a cab to Vauxhall and tried, for his own productivity, not to think of the twin secrets beneath his gloves, one that would wash off and one that would stay.

* * *

Thursday, at seven – actually seven-thirty, because it was impossible to extricate oneself from the Branch on time – Q followed Audrey's suggested address to a Chinese restaurant in Leicester Square and only realized after his arrival that maybe he should have spared some thought for his appearance. His reflection in the glass door glared at the gunpowder smudge on his sleeve and the hair that refused to curl calmly behind his ears.

Audrey had selected a table against the far wall, somewhat removed from the other diners, near enough to the kitchen that they could watch the waiters swirl in and out like dancers exiting a stage. She looked tired around the eyes, but when Q approached and pulled out a chair she greeted him with a sincere smile.

"Sorry I'm late. My work conspires against my punctuality, especially on days when other people are involved in my plans." Not that there were many of those days.

She waved aside his apology. "Oh, I know that feeling. Medical emergencies wait for no man. I only just got here ten minutes ago."

Q ran his eyes down the Chinese characters on the side of the menu and considered how much he wanted to show off. "What are you having?"

"Fried dumplings, maybe. You?"

He favored her with a tiny smirk. "You'll find out."

"What does that mean?"

She looked at him like she had done on the Tube, dubious but anticipatory, and Q feared that the longer he kept her in suspense the wilder her speculations would become, until they grew audacious enough to touch on the truth.

But then the waiter appeared and gave Q the satisfaction of both of their faces when he placed his order, the waiter's grin at this unexpected kinship and Audrey's widening eyes at the unfamiliar syllables he could summon to his bidding.

"You speak Chinese."

"Standard Mandarin," Q corrected, and then, because he didn't quite deserve her level of astonishment: "Not perfectly, the waiter had to ask me to repeat myself."

"Where did you learn a thing like that?"

"At uni. I had a lecturer who recommended it. There's quite a lot of creative computer engineering going on in China." And a great deal of expert, government-sanctioned hacking that he had known he could emulate if he only understood the theories tossed around on message boards.

She was still gaping. "Can you write it? The traditional characters?"

The napkins were fancy cloth things that pen wouldn't wash out of. "Have you got any paper?"

Audrey dug around in her handbag and produced a sheet folded into fourths. When she handed it to him her hand wavered, as if she had thought of something that almost made her withdraw.

Caving to curiosity had gotten Q in trouble more times than he could count, but that little slip had ignited inquisitiveness like fireworks, and he couldn't resist bending back a corner of the paper to see what was on the inside.

"What is this?" It appeared to be a hastily typed set of questions.

Her hands fidgeted, from embarrassment or maybe excitement, but her face gave away nothing. "My first flatmate had this list of questions that she would bring on first dates. It was called 'The Dirty Dozen.' I'm sure you can guess what it was about."

Q knew she was probably putting him on, but he wasn't sure enough to stop his eyes from flicking once down the list, checking for certain choice words.

Audrey's mouth twitched in self-satisfaction. "That's not The Dirty Dozen, but it is… protection, in a way. It's my last resort, in case we didn't have anything to talk about."

"Bit of a gimmick, isn't it?"

She tossed her head and stared out at the room without seeing. It took several seconds for her eyes to come back. "First dates are always a gimmick. You go on a socially sanctioned outing – dinner, movie, picnic in the park – nothing too expensive so you don't feel like you wasted your money if it doesn't work out. You talk in circles around the questions you want to ask, like _what are your politics_, _how important is religion in your life_, and _how many sexual partners have you had_, because if your date is a fascist or a fanatic or a nymphomaniac that's really all the information you need."

The arrival of their food interrupted her. Q watched her poise the chopsticks expertly between her fingers and elected to use a fork.

"Labour, irrelevant, and four."

Audrey looked up with one cheek full of dumpling. "Hmm?"

"The answers to your questions. Labour, irrelevant, and four."

And a grin broke across her face like the sunrise, slow but certain and dazzling. "Labour, used to be but not so much anymore, and five. I'm surprised my number is higher than yours, which just goes to show that intelligence doesn't exempt one from stereotyping." She leaned forward, close enough that the breath he drew came tinged with citrus, and plucked the list from his hand with her chopsticks. "Well, now that we've got the difficult questions out of the way…"

They chose topics by making a highly unscientific number wheel on the back of the list and spinning one of Q's unused chopsticks until it landed on an uncalled digit. Most of the questions were innocuous enough for Q to answer honestly.

("What's your favorite book?"

"_Dracula_."

"Really?"

"Yes. Is that surprising?"

"You're a British computer programmer who speaks Mandarin and likes _Dracula_."

"I've also seen every episode of _Star Trek_ and played an obscene amount of Counter-Strike, in case you were afraid I'd shatter the stereotype."

"Oh, no, shatter away.")

But it didn't take long for them to stumble on simple things he could not say.

"What's your favorite place in London?"

Q pictured his offices at Vauxhall, three whole floors of wall-mounted monitors and wireless signals pinging from mind to mind like telepathy, cars and servers in the basement, coffee and chemicals and Holly at his right hand collating data with a pen behind her ear. "The National Gallery."

"I've been there once, a long time ago. I've been thinking recently about going again." A pause, as if that were his cue from a script he had never read; for a minute he floundered, but then she swallowed and continued, unruffled by his silence. "Mine's Battersea. The power station. For years I didn't know what it was – I'd only ever been past it from a distance, but then when I was in secondary school a friend took me there one night and we snuck in with lanterns and helmets and went free soloing."

"Doesn't that mean climbing without –"

"Without ropes or safety harnesses, yes." He must have looked sufficiently impressed, because a dash of pride curled her smile. "Usually I free climb, which means you don't use aids for the ascent but you're attached to a rope in case you fall. But I've soloed up Battersea a couple of times. When you come out on the top, in the dark, with the city on all sides… it's like the whole world has inverted while you were lost in focus, and you're looking down at stars and galaxies and realizing that every point of light is another person, that all around you is this incredible creation that you're only one speck of. It takes you outside of yourself."

She was looking at him as though she had never confided this in anyone, and although he knew that couldn't be true, the thought was seductive enough to magnetize his focus, draw his body closer to the edge of the chair until their knees were touching under the table. She delivered all her answers like that, with a sincerity that would be dangerous at Six, but she didn't seem vulnerable for it – in fact the opposite, as though she could stand before the Queen and tell Her Majesty these same stories with grace. Her candor woke in him a compulsion to return the same.

"What's the worst date you've ever been on? If it's this one, don't tell me, please, because I've got nowhere to go for the next half-hour."

It was honesty, and not MI6, that made him say, "I don't think I can answer that question."

"Why?"

"It involved controlled substances – which I haven't touched since I left uni," he added hastily at her expression, "– and there was a lot of shouting. And I vomited all over the loo of an awful cheap pub. The next day my girlfriend left me."

Audrey pulled a face that was somehow comical and compassionate at once. "Ooooh. I was fishing for funny, not traumatizing. I'm sorry."

Then she scrutinized him in a way that made his shoulders tense, teeth worrying her lip and eyes narrowing as though she were deciding which way to tip the scales. Q stared back impassively; after a moment she softened, went back to her food and her answer.

"Mine was with a guy named Tommy who took me to see _Failure to Launch_, and then we had dinner with his older brother, who was a stockbroker, and the brother's wife, who was this pretty timid thing dressed like a Stepford wife – pearl necklace, even. The men spent the entire time talking about some golf club their dad belonged to that I had never visited and knew nothing about, and when I tried to ask Stepford where she went to uni, she said, 'Oh, Imperial College London, but I left when I met David, and _David's_ just invested in some property out by Heathrow, and _David's_ buying me a dog but he wants it to have a pedigree, we can't just have any old stray, you know, and doesn't _David_ have a fantastic arse, except I wouldn't know because we only ever do it with the lights off.' Then when we left I asked Tommy what he thought of Stepford, and he went on and on about how she was so lovely and he hoped he and his someday wife could have a life just like David and Stepford's."

"Maybe we dated the same Tommy," Q said without filtering, and then mentally berated himself, because this was not Q-Branch where almost everyone accepted that sexuality had no bearing on a person's usefulness to the Crown.

Audrey said nothing, but she cocked her head with a little line between her eyebrows that could mean sincere interest or unpleasant surprise.

Nothing to do but plunge ahead. "The Tommy I knew was gay, but still very invested in the nuclear family ideal. And I was definitely the wife."

Audrey snorted. "Did he _know_ you? I mean, even I barely know you, yet, but the look on your face speaks volumes."

"Evidently not. We were nineteen and living on our own for the first time; it wasn't a relationship based on conversation." She had said _yet_. "Thank you, by the way, for taking that revelation in stride."

She did the kindest thing she could have done, which was wink and return to her own story. "The sad part was that I really liked my Tommy at the time. When we split up I actually moped – ice-cream-in-my-pajamas moped. Meanwhile I think my friends had a party to celebrate him leaving."

A solution of sadness and irritation and old hurt welled in Q, because he would never understand this human weakness of wasting love on the undeserving, and because none of the people he had called friends had ever cared enough to venture opinions on his relationships. "We're well shot of the Tommys of the world, I think," he said, and she smiled back at him in sympathy.

They had almost reached the last of the questions. Audrey flipped the list over without spinning the chopstick and glanced from end to end. "What sex act have you been told you're the most talented at?"

She said it so blandly that Q almost thought he had misheard her. "It doesn't say that."

Audrey raised her eyebrows, expectantly.

Q had no problem talking about sex in the abstract, but – "I looked at that list, it doesn't say that –"

Her hand flew up too late to cover her smirk. "I had you for a second though, didn't I?" She leaned so close that Q could see little shining flecks, like mica, in the green of her eyes. "Did you really think I would tell you that on our first date? A lady must preserve some of her secrets."

Oh, there were so many things he wanted to know, wanted to know if she liked Indian food and what she looked like while she was concentrating on a patient's problems and which posters she mounted on the walls of her bedroom, wanted to know how quickly he could wipe that wicked grin off her face with his mouth at her ear and his hand down her trousers. Questions and choices and desires chased themselves around his brain and he heard himself asking, "Did it work?"

"Did what?"

"The Dirty Dozen. Did it work? For your flatmate?"

Audrey looked him dead in the eyes. "She didn't have a single serious relationship in the time I knew her, but she did have lots of sex."

And Q felt a tug deep in his chest like a fish on a line.

A sudden siren made him grip the edges of the table – _not here, not now_ – but Audrey twisted round, unconcerned, to pull her mobile from her handbag. "My alarm," she explained. "You've officially kept me out too late. I've got an early shift tomorrow." She slapped a handful of bills on the table before Q could work his wallet out of his trousers.

"I can pay –"

"Don't be ridiculous. I asked you."

Reaching into his pockets he had found a pen. "I'll at least leave my compliments for the wait staff."

She came around the table to watch him write the flowing characters that so fascinated her even though she couldn't read them – _yet_, Q thought, because he had no doubt that she could and would learn them if her curiosity grew too great. When he stood up and slid out from behind the table, she took a step in, so close that their knuckles knocked together, and Q started to apologize – but never finished, because she seized him by the knot of his tie and swallowed the words with a kiss.

It wasn't a dirty kiss, but it was _lingering_, and just before she pulled away she swiped her tongue across his bottom lip so he felt her saliva cooling and glistening like wet paint, like a mark of territory, _big plans coming soon_.

"We should do this again sometime," she said, with a polite-company smile and eyes that promised more. "Next week?"

* * *

In his flat Q dropped his bag on the floor and flopped back against the locked door, said "Oh, fuck" into the silence and wondered who was listening on the other end.

* * *

I have never known the like of this  
I've been alone and I have missed  
Things and kept out of sight  
But other girls were never quite like this

- The Beatles, "I've Just Seen a Face"

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

_Q leaned close to her ear and said, "Nice Tom Baker scarf."_

Tom Baker was the fourth actor to portray the Doctor, from 1974 to 1981 (before Q and Audrey were born). His version of the Doctor is still popular today, and that massive scarf is instantly recognizable to _Doctor Who_ fans.

_"You went to King's College London, which means you test well, you're ambitious, and you take medicine or social status or both very seriously. But you haven't been out of medical school long, so you're not a doctor, not yet. I'd say you're doing your foundation."_

King's College London School of Medicine is one of the most competitive medical schools in the U.K. Unlike the U.S., where students complete a more general undergrad degree before applying to medical school, British students can begin their medical education right out of secondary school. After (usually) five years of study, they receive a degree and apply for a position as a foundation doctor (sort of like a medical residency in the U.S.). Foundation doctors are not fully licensed and are not permitted to practice medicine without the supervision of another practitioner. (I'm not British and I don't have a Brit-picker, so please feel free to correct anything that doesn't match your experience or expertise.)

_"I don't think I'm named after anyone, though apparently there was an actor in the sixties named Robert Shaw."_

I had to throw this in here because the real-life Robert Shaw had a role in the 1963 Bond film _From Russia With Love_. Q's identity as "Robert Shaw" in my stories is a total coincidence.


	2. Unauthorized Entry

**2. Unauthorized Entry**

If you never say your name out loud to anyone  
They can never ever call you by it

- Regina Spektor, "Better"

* * *

Bond had been down to Q-Branch more times than he could count, but he realized, dodging sweater-clad techs with their eyes on their mobiles, that he had never been to the Quartermaster's office and had only the vaguest expectations molded from his memories of other, more traditional examples – somehow he doubted Q would keep wine and scotch on hand like M, or craft an intimidating atmosphere with heavy furniture and heavier drapes like the headmaster at Eton.

He found the office in the middle of a bland white hallway of conference rooms, an impassive gray door flanked by more of the same. It looked surprisingly, even disappointingly, ordinary, until Bond had his hand on the knob and caught the nameplates beside the door with the corner of his eye.

**Quartermaster**  
_Q_  
Coder to the Queen

**Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant**  
_Holly Mason_  
Gatekeeper

The lower lines had obviously been added after the fact; though they seemed of professional make, the tint did not precisely match. Child's play, Bond supposed, to fashion joke titles in a department of 3-D printers and people trained to use them. He paused, dashed his eyes again over the rank-and-file ceiling tiles and geometrically patterned carpet, and despite the sobering implications of his mission he allowed the beginnings of a smirk. Oh, there was fun to be had with these people, who handled field agents without looking them in the eye and would now have one in their midst like a wolf among lambs.

When he opened the door, Holly looked up from her computer with surprise that shifted easily into a smile. "Fancy seeing you here, Mr. Bond."

She was sitting alone at the office's only desk. Bond looked directly across the room at a second door, identical to the first, and understood. _Holly Mason, Gatekeeper._

"Q's in a meeting; make yourself comfortable." She waved a hand at an ugly, squashy sofa slouched against one whole wall.

Bond seated himself and sank much deeper into the cushions than he had expected. The office around him had no windows, sickly white paint, buzzing florescent lights – the stifling accoutrements that made Bond wonder if bureaucrats had souls – but Holly had slathered so much of her personality over every surface that his smirk stayed, and even betrayed some softness. Film and telly posters (_Doctor Who_, _Star Trek_, _The Fifth Element_); action figures (Iron Man, Wonder Woman, other neon-colored characters Bond couldn't identify); souvenir magnets from holidays (Paris, Lisbon, Venice) hanging up pictures of two children, a gap-toothed, grinning boy and a girl, inheritor of her mother's wild blond curls. Models of various spacecraft, real and fictional, acted as bookends and paperweights, and wedged on a corner shelf – Bond walked over to shift aside an obscuring manual – was a tiny replica of an early punchcard computer, no bigger than a toaster, with wires the thickness of fishing line.

"Am I as much of a boffin as you feared?" Holly asked, with a twinkling wink over her shoulder.

"At least you're honest." Bond moved to her desk, keeping a respectful distance so she would not fear his eyes on her screen (he had stolen a look when he walked in and seen nothing unusual). The corkboard mounted above was plastered with greeting cards: balloons in primary colors, cartoon animals, pastel flowers, flowing script – _Congratulations_, more than a dozen of them. "What's the occasion?"

For the first time she stopped typing; she swung her chair round to face him and beamed. Bond tried to recall the last time he had seen someone beam within the walls of MI6 and came up empty.

"I've found out that I'm pregnant," she explained, hands resting automatically on a belly that had just barely started to bulge. "Baby's due in February. I've only just told everyone this week, and I'm sure the post room would appreciate your help, Mr. Bond, scanning my many gifts for explosives and pathogens."

Bond chuckled. "Noble work." He skimmed a trained eye over the files and folders on her desk, many of them marked _Classified_. "Are we going to lose you?"

The smile didn't entirely fade, but something seemed knotted, even regretful. "I'm taking four months' maternity leave, maybe longer, depending." She nodded at the door opposite. "_He's_ not happy."

"He'll live. He's made of stronger stuff than most people realize."

Holly gave him a sharp look, edges blunted a little by sadness. "Oh, I'm well aware."

Bond abandoned his study of the room in favor of studying her, this woman who had likely spent a lifetime underestimated but whose file he had read with a rare avidity, because she had mastered a skill that he had not: forgiveness so great she could catch a criminal and see no contradiction in working for him, even caring for him with enough strength to make her voice shake when Bond had broken down the door and she had asked, over the earpiece, _How is he?_

There was something else in the room with them, maybe several somethings, the questions they had for each other hovering like flies.

But Q's door clicked open and the moment doused like a flame. A handful of techs streamed past, each carrying a tablet and wearing a look of excitement, already chattering among themselves about whatever they had just won from their boss.

Holly met the eyes of the youngest and most twitchy, a man barely twenty-five with hair approaching Q's level of untidiness. "Impress him, did you?"

"Full funding," the kid said with a crooked grin. "And he used the word _thorough_ as a compliment."

She nodded appreciatively. "High praise."

"And you lot had best get back to work before I retract any of it."

The techs scattered before Q, framed in his office doorway, a lumpy messenger bag under one arm and a shuttered laptop in the opposite hand. Over his shoulders Bond could see blank walls and an elegant but functional metal desk – in fact, _functional_ described the entire office, since Q had avoided all adornment except for a bumper sticker on the side of a filing cabinet that read _We can put our differences behind us for science, you monster_.

"You don't have an appointment, 007." Q's eyes swept over Bond, then narrowed in suspicion. "What have you done with Teresa?"

"Your secretary?" The end of the hallway near the lifts had been blocked off with a turnstile and a desk staffed by a small dark-haired woman who looked even smaller because she slouched. Bond's usual flirtation had caused her to blink like a mouse through her glasses and hover her hand over the call button for security, so he had flashed his double-oh badge, which made her squeak but let him pass, and reminded himself that he was a stranger in a strange land. "Nothing."

"I forbid you to play games with her," Q scolded, propping the messenger bag atop a cabinet and stuffing the laptop inside. "She's new here and knows nothing of the sexual appetites of the double-oh section."

"Really, Q, one would think you didn't trust me at all." Bond folded his arms and leaned against the arm of the sofa as though he belonged there, an eyebrow quirked in challenge, and an answering smirk skittered across Q's face.

"Anything in the tubes for the next twelve hours, Holly?" he asked, opening a drawer full of tangled cables.

"Chemicals is going to be up late running some sort of plastics experiment, but otherwise a quiet night in the neighborhood. Jeremy and I are meeting Tanner and Jeffries at the Black Dog at nine. You should come."

Q said, head still bent over the drawer, "I don't think they admit anyone under thirty" – and it was so solemn, even tinged with polite regret, that Bond nearly missed the gibe.

Holly reeled round in her chair. "_What_ did you say?"

Wickedness spiked Q's eyes and voice. "Oh, am I making you feel your age?"

Holly jumped up and advanced on him, shaking an admonishing finger like a saber. "One of these days – bang, zoom, straight to the moon –"

"I'm sorry, I'm much too young to understand that dated telly reference –"

She flung her arm towards the door so violently that Bond had to duck aside. "Get out."

"On my way." Q slammed the drawer and shut his office door with a punctuating finality.

Surprise snapped the teasing from Holly's tone. "You can't possibly, it's only seven."

"Astoundingly, I do have appointments to keep outside the office."

Their banter had lured Bond like an insect to nectar. "Got a date?"

Q's face stayed neutral, but his hands toyed with his mobile in a way that wasn't quite purposeful. "I'm meeting a friend for dinner."

"A sexy friend," Holly clarified with something disturbingly close to glee.

Q stilled and stared at the far wall as though he were marshaling his patience. "Must you? In front of company?"

"If there's no company, there's no one to embarrass you."

"Mrs. Mason makes a great deal of assumptions about my personal life," Q said over his shoulder to Bond, "even though I have assured her that my work leaves me much too worn to be scandalous."

"Deception and equivocation," Holly pronounced.

Q shot her what he clearly meant to be a chastising look, but he couldn't seem to summon the level of sternness he had aimed at the techs. Holly's cheeky grin didn't dim in the slightest.

"If you _are_ leaving, can you drop this off in Sullivan's office?" She proffered a beach postcard marked on the back with a strange circular text Bond couldn't read.

Q took it and rotated it in his hands, head cocked like a dog listening for its master's voice; obviously he didn't know the language either, and that made it much more interesting to him than ordinary news from an exotic country. "Where is he now?"

"Somewhere in the Caribbean. That's as far as I got. Take a crack at it before you run it through the computer."

Bond moved to look over Q's shoulder. "Some kind of code?"

"From the old Quartermaster," Holly explained. "He's spending his retirement visiting all the places he didn't get to see while he was stuck here in the office. He sends us a postcard about once a month, and they're always in a different cipher. Robert uses them to test our decryption algorithms."

Bond took a step back and examined Q. "Robert."

Q stuck the postcard under his arm to free up a hand with which to shake. "Robert Shaw. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

Bond ignored the proffered hand and the condescension that came with it. "That's not your real name."

The line of Q's lips was like a knife slash, his fringe casting shadows beneath his eyes that recalled the bruises that had taken weeks to fade. "Of course not."

The moment hung, and then Bond let it drop. "Who's Sullivan?"

"My evil twin," Holly said, straight-faced.

"He's the official head of information security." Q leaned over Holly's desk much as Bond had, reordered some of the folders, and took one to add to his bag. "He'll like the postcard, and you may as well meet him, 007, if you're going to be spending time in my Branch."

Holly cut her eyes at Q without turning her head, so fast and so small that Bond suspected he was not meant to see – a warning, or a reminder. Q's mouth thinned, but he turned away in silence, locked his office door with a swipe of a keycard and a punch of a passcode – eight digits, Bond counted – and shouldered the messenger bag.

"Walk with me on my way out." It lifted ever so slightly at the end like a question, but Bond knew the difference between a request and an order.

Holly's evil twin could not be more her opposite. When Q nudged the next door open with his shoulder, a broad-chested black man with a soldier's ramrod posture pushed his chair away from his desk, as if prepared to jump to his feet at a moment's notice, and said respectfully, "Sir." Bond kept close to the wall; this man's scrutiny promised a distinct unwelcome if Bond came anywhere near his work.

"Present from my predecessor." Q dropped the postcard on his keyboard.

A smile cracked Sullivan's solid face. "Our Mrs. Mason couldn't solve it?"

"I don't think she really tried. A luxury for a less anxious time, I suppose." A grim look sparked between them, but Q reverted to polite protocol with admirable speed. "Sullivan, this is James Bond, 007 – Bond, Lamar Sullivan."

"Pleased to finally meet you in the flesh, Commander Bond." He had a firm, dry grip, palm surprisingly callused for a scientist – the term _boffin _never entered Bond's thoughts. "I don't think I've ever shadowed you on a mission, but I've heard the stories."

"Some of them might even be true," Bond said, with a half-twitch of a grin.

Sullivan settled back in his chair, at ease. "What brings you to my office, Commander?"

Since Q had been the one to suggest that they meet, Bond looked to him to make the excuses – but Q merely raised his eyebrows as if to say, _Go on_, and then Bond understood why he was being paraded around.

He wouldn't give in to any pissing contest between Q and M. "Familiarizing myself with the top staff of Q-Branch. Lots of new faces. I was dead for three months towards the end of last year, in case you weren't aware."

"I remember something of the sort," Sullivan acknowledged. "Glad you decided it wasn't working out for you."

He had never regretted his choice to come back, but the Skyfall incident occupied a restricted section in the back of his brain, to be taken out only in private moments with a glass of good scotch, and although he had learned to mock his usual level of flippancy, Bond preferred to veer off the subject as quickly as possible. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Q shift his weight impatiently – or perhaps nervously, and a memory stirred of Q-Branch underground, a crowded Tube car, the kid's voice uncertain in his ear.

"I'm out for the evening," Q told Sullivan, hand on the doorknob. "Holly'll be here for another hour, I expect. Call me if anything turns up on your scan."

"Yes, sir."

Sullivan's gaze burned the back of Bond's skull even after the door had closed between them.

They walked to the end of the hallway, passed through Teresa's turnstile, and rounded the corner without speaking. Bond had just resolved to feign ignorance of the Branch's suspicions when Q broke the silence.

"Don't think I don't know why you're here."

The dismissiveness couldn't turn Bond defensive, but he did feel a warning was in order. "This doesn't have to be difficult."

"I have no intention of making it so. I want this person rooted out. But my staff doesn't need to be nannied or distracted, so I won't tolerate either. And I expect that you'll keep either myself or Holly up to speed on anything you discover." He gave Bond a little strained smile, not much different from the way Mallory had brushed aside Bond's quips during their conversation. "Let's not keep secrets from each other, shall we?"

Bond illustrated the impossibility of that promise in the most succinct way he knew. "Are you going to tell me your name?"

Q swung round to face him in the middle of the corridor. Their eyes met, faint surprise and respect and a dark humor all readable in Q's, and Bond realized that for the first time today he had the Quartermaster's full attention.

Then Q turned his head and disappeared behind the arcing reflections of the lights in his glasses. "Unfortunately that's not my choice to make."

* * *

At times it was fun to be Robert Shaw.

In the earliest days he had resented it, resented that by agreeing to work for the Secret Service he had somehow given up the right to a name and a history – but that history had taken a wrong turn after his eighteenth birthday, found him angry and afraid and a traitor to the nation, and part of him was relieved to leave it behind. MI6 had gifted him a paper man, a fictitious entry that he could flesh out as he chose, and for a few years he curated the name carefully. Robert Shaw liked thrillers, especially the classics, so he went to the London Library and read le Carre and Greene and Maugham. Robert Shaw's father made a solid living in pharmaceuticals, so he selected a house and a secondary school that felt appropriately upper-class and memorized their floor plans. Robert Shaw wore neckties like a respectable adult. It became a science experiment: the creation of an enviable man, not so flawless as to be unapproachable, but lacking the glitches that had made Ben Rossum exploitable by friends and MI6 and his own heart.

_Next week_ with Audrey turned out to be ten days later, a rare Sunday when Q didn't have to go in to work for any length of time, lunch on the outdoor patio of an Italian restaurant and then a meandering stroll through Hyde Park. The lack of structure had aroused Q's skepticism – he couldn't remember the last time he had taken a walk without a destination in mind, or even the last time he had been free for an entire afternoon – but he had not seen Audrey once at the coffee shop since their first date, and although he had typed out several variations of the same text message, none of them sufficiently conveyed his intertwined feelings of concern and anticipation.

"I almost thought you'd forgotten me," he said, a little cruelly, when Audrey plopped into the opposite seat ten minutes late and flipped open a menu without even setting down her handbag, as if to make up for lost time.

"Sorry." A few thin strands of hair had escaped from her bun, and the sunlight burned them as shimmery and insubstantial as an aura. "I've got a new schedule at St. Thomas's – that's why I haven't been at Charing Corner at all this week – and I haven't quite adjusted." She looked down at her hands, busy peeling a straw, dunking it in a glass of water, swirling the ice cubes like a cocktail. A wry smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. "My schedule change was actually the reason I was able to work up the courage to ask you to dinner. I figured if you said no, we'd never see each other again and I could be mortified in private, and if you said yes, we'd come up with ways to see each other besides exchanging coy glances over coffee."

Q couldn't stop himself from returning the smile. "I've been described in many ways – not all of them flattering – but I think _coy_ is new."

She composed a look of playful disdain, lips in a perfect pink moue. "I was mostly describing myself, thank you very much. One of my ex-boyfriends once told me I have sultry eyelashes." Sincerity now, a tiny flash of teeth as she chuckled. "I was flattered, but I also thought it was hilarious, and he sulked at me for several days because I laughed so hard."

They independently decided to order off of the wine menu. "Does this make us day drinkers?" Audrey asked.

"I think it makes us pretentious."

"Why?"

Q cast a pointed look at the building's brick façade, the grape vines carved into the doorframe. "Would we be drinking wine if we were anywhere other than an Italian restaurant? We're falling prey to a particular assumption about how cultured people appreciate food and drink." Then unexpected honesty, the same desire to meet her on her terms, dropped his gaze to the tablecloth. "Also I admit I was attempting to impress you with my knowledge of wine."

Audrey pressed her lips together as though she were struggling against amusement. "You picked the wrong girl for that. I just ordered the one with the most evocative name. _Thorny Rose_ – gives your evening a little fleeting spice, but handle it wrong and you'll have only regrets."

"I assumed as much. When I placed my order you didn't even bat an eye."

Teasing also failed to phase her; in fact, she leaned forward on her folded arms and looked him in the face in a way that was both an examination and a dare, and Q held steady even as something shivered inside of him and his hands tightened on his knees under the table –

They broke the gaze in the same instant, as if scalded. Audrey's voice had the faintest wobble when she said, "How do you know so much about wine?"

From listening to double-ohs insinuate themselves into the parties and head tables and hotel rooms of despots and fences and kingpins, and from occasionally bribing room service to deliver pieces of waterproof tech beneath the ice of the wine bucket. "I have friends who are interested in that sort of thing."

As before, he navigated their conversation with vagueness and half-truths, protection for both of them from outright lies and equally hazardous honesty. And he discovered very quickly the inadequacies of his disguise, the twists he had never thought of and the sentences that had been scripted for him, because Robert Shaw did not really belong to him.

"Did you grow up in London?"

"No, Cambridge, near the university." (They had settled on this because he knew the town from his time spent studying, because it was easier to lie about familiar things.)

"Do your parents still live there?"

"Yes. I don't often see them. We're not close." (His parents were buried beside each other in a cemetery in Bedford, the same date of death chiseled twice into their shared headstone, but orphan status was rarer, more noteworthy, than estrangement.)

"Do your friends call you Robert? Or is it Rob, or Bobby?"

"Just Robert." (Always Ben, never Benjamin, unless he was in trouble – his grandmother had called him Benjy and he had hated it until the day she died, until he realized that beneath the adolescent embarrassment there had always been a layer of affection for the name, because it had been given by the only person in his life whose love was as certain as the tide.)

In exchange she told him that she been raised in Reading by an actuary and a bookseller, the youngest and the only girl of three siblings, one of them now the architect and the other a correspondent for the BBC, and Q asked polite questions and pretended that he had not used the considerable resources at his disposal to run checks on the morning of their first date (her father had been arrested, once, for driving while intoxicated, years before her birth; the correspondent brother had recently won an award for spot reporting; her mother had nearly three thousand pounds sitting in an account at a bank no one else in the family used, as a surprise or a safety net or maybe a plan).

But Audrey could paint them in more vibrant colors than the facts or his surmises suggested. The family had owned a massive furball of a dog named Sir Paul, after the Beatle, and they had spread gobs of his fur around the flowerbeds in the back garden to get rid of moles. Her parents had met at the first bookshop her mother owned, in the basement of a lawyer's office in Liverpool, and they celebrated their anniversary every year by driving there and asking a stranger to take their picture in front of the building. The architect claimed to have encountered a young, drunken Prince William at a party during university.

"My mum went to secondary school with Imelda Staunton," Q offered, but then stopped, because he couldn't remember if this was the truth or one of his revisions.

They had a second round of drinks and walked several laps around the lake and got into an animated discussion about the writing on the most recent season of _Doctor Who_. Q refused to be photographed both for safety and on principle, but Audrey coaxed him into taking silly pictures of her with several of Hyde Park's unusual sculptures – kissing the muzzle of a drinking horse head, fleeing from a giant hand steering a toy car, cowering beneath the scrutiny of a massive long-necked bird. By two o'clock the temperature had achieved unusual heights for late spring, so they bought ice lollies from a street vendor and Q very carefully did not look at the way Audrey sucked hers and licked the purple stickiness from her lips with the tip of a dyed tongue. Eventually they wandered out of the park, along the adjacent streets, and wound up in a chintzy souvenir shop among London Underground magnets and Big Ben salt-and-pepper shakers and Queen's Guard costume hats. Audrey popped open a set of _Doctor Who_ nesting dolls and arranged them in a tableau in front of a panoramic postcard of the Thames. The song playing over the speakers trickled into Q's consciousness like water through gravel; he could match the cadence but not the name, until Audrey began to sing along under her breath.

_Haven't had a dream in a long time  
See, the life I've had could make a good man bad  
So for once in my life let me get what I want  
Lord knows it would be the first time…_

She saw him watching her and grinned. "Didn't you know, the romances of all Brits under thirty must be soundtracked by the Smiths. I think it's law."

Q stepped in, close enough to feel the heat of her, see the tiny pale hairs curling on the back of her neck – not touching, not quite. "Is this a romance?"

She had gone very still except for the tilt of her head, craning to look at him over her shoulder with one sharp, glittering eye. When she spoke it was in a whisper so small he had to read her lips to make sure he understood. "How do you define it?"

Then she moved away down the aisle without a backward look, but with a little sway he was sure was meant for him, and Q chewed on his lip in frustration and wonder that such an honest thing should be so complex.

* * *

There were more restaurants, more wine and conversation, more wanderings over city pavements fading from simmering daylight to the gilding glow of night. There was the Tate Modern and BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and the National Gallery (Q stopped in front of _The Fighting Temeraire_ and asked her, "What do you see?" and she said, after a long silence, "Mortality," and Q thought, _There's the crux_). There was the Maughan Library at King's College, which Audrey snuck him into without an appointment or application. There were films, new releases at the multiplex and classics at an art cinema, and they argued so long and so ardently about _Mulholland Drive_ that Audrey turned away and brushed off his hand when he tried to slide it around her hips in the Tube and Q worried that he had crossed some line – but by the end of the evening he had earned back a smile and her fingers laced with his, and if she wondered why he wore gloves even as the weather heated up she kept the question to herself.

Not all of the pieces fit. Their schedules did not compromise. Audrey canceled twice, including once when he had already been waiting at the restaurant for forty-five minutes, channeling his unease at her absence and silence into passive-aggressive ordering of appetizers that he ate by himself. Q moved dates and times so frequently that her phone greetings became shaded with wariness, a slowly wearing willingness to be flexible, to try again.

They were rarely alone with each other. The city chaperoned, permitting the holding of hands in art galleries, a quick kiss just before intermission ended, maybe a furtive snog against the back wall of a pub, interrupted by opening doors and staggering drinkers. Q's body attuned to even a delicate touch, and as they grew bolder but not bold enough he suddenly understood one of the songs Holly was always listening to at the office:

_Oh, imagination you are cruel  
And uncomfortable_

Q had long ago resigned himself to masturbating in the shower, and the idea of rumors running loose at Six made him want to knock his head against a wall, but frustration so savaged dignity that several times he almost crawled to Mallory's office to renegotiate the terms of his parole. Audrey did not volunteer her flat, and he did not press. His salary could support hotel rooms, but even the most expensive suite wouldn't settle the tawdry associations that came with paying for that kind of privacy, or his fear of the inevitable conversation about why they had to hide.

Because _they_ didn't really have to hide at all – she was real, and whole, and honest, and had no idea that those adjectives didn't apply to him. Some nights when they parted he rested his head against the window of the Tube car and gripped his left wrist, worked a finger under his cuff and traced it over scar tissue raised like speed bumps, and considered unintended consequences and the myriad ways to hurt a man.

* * *

(He hadn't even been back in the office for a full day when Holly had said, "Show me," and nodded to his bandaged arm.

Q hesitated. She fixed him with a firm look, the one that sent the new hires scurrying but to which Q was mostly immune.

In a low voice she said, "I heard Bond's reaction when he was patching you up at the safe house. I know it's not pleasant, but if I'm going to cover for you or lie for you I would like to know exactly what I'm helping you hide."

And she _would_ lie if he asked – she had already lied for him, many times, even though dissembling was not in her nature, not something she valued or enjoyed.

So Q worked his arm out of the sling and rolled up his sleeve, let the coils of gauze shuffle off like dead skin so Holly could take his hand in hers. He watched her eyes sweep across the scarring letters, her mouth shape the syllables of _Property_, and through their single point of contact, palm to palm, he felt her start to quiver.

She made a painful coughing noise as though she had tried to clear her throat but couldn't. "Tell me at least one of you got a good crack at him."

"I pistol-whipped him, at the end," Q reassured. "Bond said I should have just shot him."

She bowed her head against her laughter, as if she meant to protect him from it. Through the curls curtaining her face he saw her eyes close for a moment. When they opened again there was something in them that he couldn't read, something that frightened him, because he thought he knew every permutation of this woman's face and he had never been able to acknowledge calmly the times he was proven wrong.

Her voice was clotted. "I hope he rots."

Q could not replace the bandage by himself. They both ignored the trembling of Holly's hands, the three tries it took her to tie the knot. As he left the office he spared one glance back, just in time to see her sink down on the sofa with her head in her hands, and ultimately he was a coward who would not watch her cry.)

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

_Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant_  
_Holly Mason_  
_Gatekeeper_

The idea that Q's second-in-command is codenamed "R" was originally raised in _The World is Not Enough_, where Bond jokingly says to Q's assistant, "If he's Q, does that make you R?" (Fear Pierce Brosnan's rapier wit!) I wasn't planning to use this designation because it's not technically canon, but then I discovered that in the British Army the Quartermaster is assisted by a Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant. I believe the words that came out of my mouth were, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."

_Holly jumped up and advanced on him, shaking an admonishing finger like a saber. "One of these days – bang, zoom, straight to the moon –"_

Holly's doing Ralph Kramden from _The Honeymooners_.

_(Q stopped in front of The Fighting Temeraire and asked her, "What do you see?" and she said, after a long silence, "Mortality," and Q thought, There's the crux)._

In _Skyfall _Q poses the same question about the same painting to Bond, and Bond's response is, of course, "A bloody big ship."

The song lyrics embedded in the chapter come from The Smiths' "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" and Danielle Ate the Sandwich's "Some Other Girl," which, ironically, is about unrequited lesbian crushes.


	3. Calling Fire

**3. Calling Fire**

"Here's what we know," Holly said unprompted, handing Bond a tablet displaying an interactive map of the world.

Bond had visited an unsuspecting Q-Branch nearly a dozen times over the last few weeks, on top of the typical appointments for one mission, a ten-day manhunt in South Korea that brought him dangerously close to the Demilitarized Zone and twice roused Q at what must have been four in the morning in Britain. He had snapped at Bond over the comm link like a disgruntled terrier but made it all worth it by grumbling that he hadn't forced his underlings to report "because I can't in good conscience subject them to you at this hour, and anyway Holly's got to be up in a bit with her kids." (Q cloaked his affections in such snideness that Bond regarded any sincere admittance of them as a victory – for whom, he could not say.)

Their operations had not bent to accommodate him, so he spent too much time lounging in spare chairs and waiting to see if Q or Holly or Sullivan had a free moment, training his ears on the techs and masking his annoyance at their mundane gossip. Teresa had blocked off a standing appointment with Q, half an hour twice a week, but meetings ran long or missions blew up and usually Bond entered the office to find Holly instead.

The map she had given him bristled, like a two-dimensional pincushion, with blue markers and hovering photographs. "Each dot represents an agent who's been compromised by the mole," she explained. "Tap one and it'll bring up the details of the case – what they were up to and who they were after, what information we think the mole leaked and its security level, and the damage done as a result."

Bond went through them at random:

**Karim Bakkal** – _Egypt, February_ – monitoring militant supporters of Muslim Brotherhood; communications disrupted by introduction of signal-jamming equipment based on Q-Branch prototype, information level Gamma; Mr. Bakkal forced to abandon post after six weeks due to inability to request supplies or other aid; agents continue to face communication difficulties when posted in major Egyptian cities.

**Michael Davies** – _Belize, March_ – infiltration of Triangle drug cartel, joint mission with the CIA; Mr. Davies and CIA agent REDACTED responsible for arrests of five high-ranking members; location of detainees leaked to cartel members, information level Alpha; detainees freed in firefight that wounded both agents; previous bases of operation now abandoned, location of cartel leader unknown, no significant decrease in illegal drug traffic in region.

**Alexandra Scott** – _Singapore, May_ – undercover investigation of human trafficking ring; exclusive client revealed to be MI6 informant, information level Alpha; both client and Ms. Scott severely beaten and threatened with sexual assault prior to extraction; no agents or informants currently secured within trafficking operation.

"They're treating your firewalls like a revolving door," Bond remarked, careful not to let it sound like a condemnation.

"Ah, but there's the rub." Holly held up one finger like a schoolteacher. "We've had security breaches throughout the year – intelligence agencies attract that sort of thing, some legitimate and some just kids in their basements wanting to cause as much chaos as possible – but they don't match the leaks on our list. There certainly hasn't been enough data stolen to account for all of this bedlam." She gave him the kind of smile shared by people who know the same secret. "Certain spectacle-wearing Cambridge kids aside, we're actually quite good at catching intruders and locking them out before they can make off with our files."

Bond dropped his gaze to the tablet. "So whoever's doing this has high enough clearance to access all this information legitimately." He had known this from the beginning – they must all have known, M and Q and Holly and Sullivan – but until now no one had acknowledged it aloud. He looked back at Holly. "Doesn't that narrow the list?"

"Not as much as you'd think. There's a half-dozen people in M's office alone with high enough clearance. Our Branch is divided into eight different departments, and the heads of each department and their top staff have access to all these files as well. And – I'm telling you things you already know, but – the double-oh section can request access to nearly any file, if they can prove relevance to their latest mission. We've cleared all of you, by the way; none of you have been into the files for more than one of these cases."

"Isn't it possible that someone is… impersonating someone else with a higher security clearance? Piggybacking on their authorization?"

Holly grinned; he had impressed her, unexpectedly. "Yes, it's possible, though in our system it's extremely difficult. The more secure a file is, the more hoops you have to jump through to get to it. A fingerprint scan is more secure than a password, but the computer's record of that fingerprint is still a single piece of data that can be stolen or replaced. So you use combinations – fingerprint scan _and_ password, voice recognition _and_ retina scan." Then she sighed. "The problem with Q-Branch – with all of MI6, really – is we have sophisticated protocols everywhere you turn, but we also have the people who created all those protocols, and therefore know the best ways to exploit them."

This time the look they shared was grim, but Holly's voice retained its calm. "If you swipe over to the next screen, you'll find our list of all the people who have the right security clearance to be our mole."

Bond scanned the list, picking out the names he could match to faces and voices: _Maxwell Goldberg; Alan Jeffries; Gareth Mallory; Holly Mason; Robert Shaw; Lisa Stuber; Lamar Sullivan; Bill Tanner. _

Goldberg was a tall, thin-faced mechanical engineer with the sharp, jerky joints of a marionette; he stuttered when excited but had once guided Bond through a complex rewiring of an airplane's data recorder with unshakeable composure. Lisa Stuber was the humorless head of Telecommunications, the only woman in Q-Branch who had shown neither flattery nor disgust when confronted by Bond's smoothest smile. Goldberg had no poker face, unless the stutter was an elaborate act; Stuber, with servers full of incriminating words at her fingertips, made a much better candidate.

The most obvious suspects, the ones a child would guess, were the top staff of Information Security, and Bond had been watching them closely. (He wasn't quite hoping for the obvious answer – that would be dull, almost insulting. But a fast resolution meant healthier survivors – better a quick drench than a long soak.) Sullivan emanated such an aura of command that he could spark a room to attention with a single word, and Bond had had the pleasure of sitting in on a meeting with a pair of bureaucrats who had been thoroughly confused that this steel-spined military man deferred to a bespectacled kid in a lint-ridden cardigan. Sullivan's second, Jeffries, was a slicked-hair smartarse with a comfortable grin and a playful jibe for everyone who crossed his path. Bond liked him on sight.

Most of the other suspect names conjured an image and a posting, some shakier than others, but no memorable interactions. Bond filed them away for future investigation and toyed with the functions of the list. One of the buttons allowed him to sort both data and personnel by clearance level, and once he had done so, he scrolled straight to the top.

"Omega level – that's the highest level of clearance."

Something swept through Holly's eyes like headlights passing on a dark road, and he knew he had touched on something important, something she had been waiting for him to uncover. "Yes. The mole hasn't used any information from those files – yet."

"If he does, it'll narrow the list significantly."

She shook her head, slight and a little sad. "I don't think you really want that to happen."

"Why?"

"Because that would mean the mole is one of a very short list of people you don't want betraying MI6." She leaned over and tapped a button that highlighted the names:

_Gareth Mallory; Holly Mason; Robert Shaw; Bill Tanner. _

Both of them let the silence linger. Holly wiped some dust from the tablet screen with her thumb, sweeping twice across the names as though she could erase them. Bond wondered which hurt her more: seeing herself on the list of suspects, or realizing that the only other options were friends.

"Who do you think it is?" he asked, as gently as he knew how. "You must have some suspicions."

She regarded him with an uncharacteristic shutter over her face, void of the cheerfulness she wore as cheekily as her colorful trainers. For a moment she reminded him of her boss, blank calculation the only discernible sentiment – and it struck him, then, that he had yet to gain the full trust of the most trusting person, that even the locks-bolted Quartermaster had opened more doors for Bond than Holly had. Honesty came easily and sensibly to Holly, and so made her lack of trust harder to perceive, and that much harder to breach.

She shook herself as though she had just realized that she was staring. Bond saw her eyes dart to the closed door of Q's office with an inarticulate wariness.

"Whoever it is," she said, "it won't be pretty" – and Bond, who knew betrayal better than any of them, understood exactly what she was afraid of.

* * *

Early the following morning Bond returned to Q-Branch to corner its elusive leader. Holly had allowed him to keep the tablet if he agreed not to take it anywhere except his flat, and Bond considered all the things MI6 tracked with GPS (watches, mobiles, the Quartermaster) and understood that was no idle request. Over dinner he had read each entry twice, then gone for a jog along the river with the details churning in his mind like the wake behind a ferry.

Q-Branch was cavernous, if one included the garage and the server room, but Bond had invested significant time in a pudgy, keen-sighted man named Dooley, who appreciated caffeinated gifts and friendly banter and worked in the main monitoring room. On arrival he visited first Chemical Engineering, which stocked the best coffee, then Dooley, who was parked as usual in front of a bank of screens that fed him black-and-white evidence of the activities of the Branch. The coffee offering earned him a tip that Q was logged into a workstation at InfoSec.

Downstairs the door gaped wide, framing Q at a desk in the center of an empty maze of computer terminals. Bond paused just out of sight to observe the Quartermaster when he thought no one was watching. Spine straight, eyes focused, just as he had looked the first time Bond had seen him at work – but the similarity was only natural, because someone was always watching.

A door buzzed open on the opposite side of the room. Holly swept in with her eyes on her mobile and the other arm sagging under a stack of folders and books and a tablet.

"My BND meeting is in five minutes and Bill is _still_ messaging me reminders – it's as if I've never done this before –"

Her gaze fell on Q's computer screen and Bond followed by instinct, because a change crossed her face as soon as she saw what Q was working on, a change that Bond didn't have time to articulate but he knew was bad. At this distance he couldn't read the text, but the sight of the graphics gritted his teeth: a painted skull, a radiating red map, the burned-out remains of what had once been a grand house…

"The Skyfall case is closed," Holly stated, but Bond heard the question beneath.

"I'm wondering," Q said slowly, as though each word were a step through a minefield, "if the mole's first successful disruption was in the service of Raoul Silva."

He looked at Holly with a challenge in the set of his shoulders. After several still seconds she dumped her armful on the adjacent desk and took a deep breath, and Bond knew she was preparing for war.

"If the mole helped Silva steal from us and escape," she ventured, treading as carefully as Q, "if his first double-cross was so… successful – why did he wait almost two months before trying again?"

The answer came so quickly that Bond knew Q had anticipated the question. "Fear of detection while we were retooling our defenses in the aftermath."

Holly tossed her head in frustration. "Yes, we rewrote parts of the system, but we also moved back to Babylon, and there was plenty of confusion during that time. Enough to justify some packets of insecure or missing data. Why waste the opportunity?"

Q stared at the monitor. His eyes moved back and forth and up and down as though he were reading, but there seemed to be a great distance between him and the screen. "Maybe he realized he was in too deep. Targeting the head of MI6 – the mole hasn't aided anyone else with a plan that audacious." He shot her a shadow of his usual sardonic smile. "After all, if he brings us down, then he hasn't got anything valuable to offer."

She came closer, leaned her hip on the desk inches from his elbow. Q's hands flew to the desk's edge, then dropped to his lap, as if his first impulse had been to push his chair away.

"Robert," she said, and Bond marveled at the mixture of so many meanings into one word, gentleness and a warning and a plea – "Please tell me this isn't –"

"I am investigating an avenue that might lead us to new evidence –"

"Look me in the eye and tell me you actually believe it."

Q swung sharply round to face her, half-formed words already fading from his lips. Their eyes locked. Between them silence spread like acetylene, invisible and explosive.

A mobile alarm ruptured the hush. Holly reached into her pocket to turn it off without looking. Her next words were so quiet that Bond almost missed them – but anger strung through them like barbed wire, accusation and desperation in equal measure.

"You don't believe it's true, you're _hoping_ it's true. You're hoping there's somebody else out there to blame."

Then she turned on her heel, scooped up her folders, and left through the door from which she had come. Q stared after her, for a moment, then turned back to his computer and closed the files on his screen, one by one. A door had shut behind his eyes, but Bond caught the faintest tremor in the line of his throat as he stood up from the desk and began to walk away.

* * *

At least, Q thought ruefully, Silva had been straightforward about what he wanted, and relatively quick in announcing it.

If this were an outside attack he could design a dozen ways to defeat it. Instead it was a guessing game, a problem with too many undefined variables. The suspect list ran on an endless iterating loop, each permutation returning the same result.

It could be Lisa (she had accessed the relevant data the greatest number of times), or it could be Sullivan (he had programmed the gates that separated the clearance levels), or it could be M (in which case they were all buggered, especially him, because consider how easy, how enticing it would be to pin the blame on the pet criminal, how the story already had the ring of truth).

He combed the files, searching for something that could not be connected to any project or mission, any obscure code or suspicious information dumps. He sorted the data in combinations that made less and less sense the more he stared at them. Sometimes he saw patterns where there were none. Sometimes he woke gasping in the middle of the night (on the nights he slept at all) with a fear that he refused to look in the face.

One late evening he had gone again down the rabbit hole, following the access string with more feeling than thought, nursing a mug of cold tea and fighting irritation at the occasional disruption (InfoSec was rolling out the latest round of security patches, meaning the network might boot him without warning). Somehow he wound up in Archives among terabytes of digitized records and abandoned prototypes and copies of viruses that he imagined contained in glass like samples of a real disease. Keyloggers, worms, backdoors – probably his own malicious code, which he had rendered obsolete in both MI6's servers and his own store of knowledge. Files fell open at his fingertips, stacking the screen with blueprints and rich text and more folders like nested puzzle boxes, until he was running more than a dozen scripts –

And the program crashed.

Q sighed. No one had any business with Archives this late, which meant Jeffries was probably tinkering with the authorization, had maybe dismissed all active users without even checking to see if there _were_ any active users –

But it wasn't just the program, his whole computer had locked up, cursor unresponsive, monitor cutting to black – and a single flash of text, bright enough to linger like sunspots even after it vanished from the screen –

_Not such a clever boy._

He could not recall jumping to his feet, but he was standing, somehow, every nerve wired tight and firing like sparklers, hands fixed in fists that stretched the scar tissue and sparked pain through tendons that would always be weaker than before. The silence of the room pressed on his eardrums like water. The faint rush of the ventilation. A door slamming somewhere down the hall. A whirr from below (the garage; they were rotating tyres today). The hum of his computer, almost outside conscious hearing, and his own breathing – that was all. After a minute his screensaver activated, scrolling lazily through space shots from the Hubble Telescope.

Trembling seized him. Maybe he hadn't seen it at all. Maybe it had been a trick of the light, of an overtaxed mind. Maybe this had been how they felt, the security teams who had traced him, alone in the buzzing banality of an ordinary office, aware that beneath the silence something sinister was operating outside their control.

The shaking followed him out of the office and through the Tube and beneath the blankets in the solitude of his flat, where he had long since learned to bury his pains in silence so MI6 would never know.

* * *

"You look awful," Audrey greeted. She was leaning against the west side of a Trafalgar Square plinth, eating fish and chips out of a paper sack and seeking the fitful rays of sunlight that dribbled through a patchy blanket of clouds.

Q put his back against the cold stones, straightened his spine, and willed the ache between his shoulder blades to disappear. "Well, that's another entry on the list of women who find me distasteful."

"I didn't say you _were_ awful, I said you _look_ awful. Looking awful is fixable; being awful is usually permanent." She held out the bag. "Chip?"

Q took a handful and forced himself to eat them one at a time. Audrey scuffed her shoe across the pavement so that his left foot and her right were touching, side-by-side, and Q realized how small she was, and how strange that she occupied a much larger space in his mind than her size would suggest.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Work?"

"Big project. Poorly defined parameters, looming deadline, anxiety-inducing corporate oversight. Massive headaches all the way round."

"Anything I can do to help?"

"Anything you do is helping."

He was not very good at the gentle phrases – much easier to sincerely express a dishonest sentiment than uncurl the soft underbelly of his emotions. But Audrey rewarded them with a smile or a touch or a reciprocal saying, and that was encouragement enough.

She passed him what remained of the bag of chips; Q abandoned decorum and shoveled the entire thing into his mouth. Audrey watched him with an eye-crinkling smile, the kind that both warmed him and rattled his nerves, because he could never be sure if she was amused by the present or some unknowable variation of the past.

"Do you really have a list of women who find you distasteful?"

"It's mostly my ex-girlfriend from uni and a couple of girls that I fancied in secondary school. The list of men who find me distasteful is much longer and a bit more concerning."

And it was Q's turn to smile at some secret amusement, because she wouldn't laugh if she knew how true that was.

* * *

Q had ordered tickets to _The Importance of Being Earnest_, because he had read it in secondary school but never seen it performed, and Audrey considered that a crime. ("It's one of my prerequisites, didn't we go over this on our first date?") It had been weeks since he had been in the proper mood for humor, but the actors projected such playfulness, their dialogue thrusting and parrying with a saber's speed, that he allowed himself to relax against the plush seating and glance at his mobile only two or three times per act. Audrey spent the performance leaning on his shoulder and tossing smart comments in his ear, most of them directed at the young man playing Algernon, who was exactly the sort of lean, dark-browed baritone Q would have eyed over the top of his laptop at uni.

By the time they stepped back onto the pavement, full night had fallen and taxi headlights illuminated swathes of silver rain like the revelation of ghosts. Q put up the hood of his raincoat and paced the block three times in pursuit of an unoccupied cab, returning wet to the knees and unsuccessful.

"Don't you live round here?" An unfair question – he knew the answer, had in fact bought the tickets for a late hour at a theater in Audrey's neighborhood on a night with a certainty of rain, because he could be a patient man but he was also a bit of a cheat.

Audrey was dancing from foot to foot beneath the awning, hugging herself against the chill. She turned so she could point in the right direction without unwrapping her arms. "Four blocks down, two blocks over. Make a run for it?"

Q had a longer stride, but Audrey had run track for her secondary school, and she hit the top step of the block of flats a full five seconds ahead of him. In the lobby they sagged panting and dripping against opposite sides of the stair railings. Q unzipped his raincoat and used his tie to wipe down his glasses; without them Audrey became the suggestion of a woman, curving impressionistic smudges of blue and white and red. When he put them back on she was smiling with a hint of ruefulness, as though she had tricked him into entering a contest she desperately wanted him to win.

"I think I have to offer you a cup of tea now," she said. "You did just run after me in the rain."

Q snorted with laughter. "Tea would be lovely."

They climbed the stairs and stopped outside the first door. Audrey fidgeted with her keys. "…I think both of my flatmates are home."

Q eyed the perfectly ordinary numbers on the back of the door and pressed his thumb over the peephole. The mere presence of peepholes, the fish-eye distortion, the way they allowed someone to creep close and monitor without your knowledge, had unsettled him even before he worked for MI6. "Is that a problem?"

"They're a bit…" She sucked in her cheeks and blew them out again with an exaggerated puff of breath. "…Um, enthusiastic. My last relationship was… it ended very badly, and they're excited because you haven't turned out to be the spawn of Satan."

"Not a high hurdle to clear."

Audrey's eyes flared. "I know."

For a long minute they stood in silence, Audrey staring down the door as though her glare could intimidate the objects and events waiting on the other side. Q's emotions pinged from discomfort to amusement and back again. Damp crept from his hair down the back of his neck and into his collar.

"Can we –"

Audrey shook herself. "Yeah."

She jammed the key into the lock, twisted, and shoved her way into the flat like a general charging the battlefield.

As soon as the door swung open, Q spotted the movement of shadows in the kitchen archway, heard a voice just out of sight: "Audrey, you didn't get caught in that, did you – oh."

A tiny, fine-boned woman with green hair and several creative piercings had taken one step into the front room and frozen like a curious animal, eyes wide and chin tilted as she stared. Then her face broke into a wide and welcoming smile that reminded Q of Holly – the expression equivalent of an enveloping hug.

"You must be Robert." Before Q or Audrey could confirm or deny, she leaned back into the kitchen and hollered, "Will, stop hiding, Eliza's brought her Freddy."

A thud echoed from the depths of the flat, followed by a second or two of creaking and rustling, and then a tall man with the broad shoulders of a field agent appeared behind the first flatmate, grinning through damp fringe. He wore nothing but a pair of loose sweatpants and a towel draped around his neck, as though he had just gotten out of the shower. Q heard Audrey mutter, "_Of_ course."

"Finally, Audrey," the man – Will – boomed, wiggling past the delicate green-haired girl with a clumsiness that belied Q's initial assessment. "I was starting to think you'd invented him."

"Just because you're not touching a cute boy's dick doesn't mean other people lose the privilege," the female flatmate reminded, in the mild but tired tone of a mother who must constantly reiterate the rules.

"_Thirty seconds_," Audrey sputtered. "He and I have been here for all of thirty seconds and you lot can't contain yourselves –"

But Q snickered and shucked off his raincoat and sat down on the sofa to unlace his shoes, and Audrey looked at him with a fond mixture of disbelief and gratitude. Q gave her a little twinge of a smile from beneath his fringe.

Will bounced on the balls of his feet; he reminded Q of a large puppy that still thought itself a lapdog. "Well? Aren't you going to introduce us, Audrey?"

"Yeah, Audrey, mind your manners –"

Audrey held up a halting hand, then made a sweeping gesture that encompassed both Will, who was still bouncing, and the green-haired girl, who had perched cross-legged on the arm of a hideous floral-patterned armchair. "Robert, may I present my incorrigible flatmates: Katherine Devon, prefers to be known as Kitty or Kit, and William Wallace, not to be confused with the historical figure." Her face sharpened. "Now scoot."

"You can't order me around in my own flat," Will teased, mock sternness ruined by his persistent grin. "I have rights."

"Including the right to ogle Audrey's boyfriend, apparently," Kit deadpanned, raising an eyebrow at Q. "Watch out for him, Robert, he's not nearly as innocent as he looks. More than one committed skirt-chaser has turned for him."

Will snorted; Audrey tinged pink across the cheeks and opened her mouth to fend them off; Q knew, in the back of his mind, that defense was expected of him, but his gaze had caught a clutter of machinery on the coffee table, wheels and pulleys and an Arduino board winking light like a precious stone.

"Who's the maker?"

Will simultaneously raised his hand and ducked his head, as if his emotions were stretching him like taffy. "A mate and I teach an after-school science program at one of the primary schools. We're trying to build a robot that can pick up blocks with the crane, you know, like one of those claw games – but there's some glitch in our program. We can get the crane to drop the claw, but we can't get the angle of the arm to change."

"Where's your laptop?"

Will pointed confusedly at the archway behind him. "…Kitchen, I think."

Q beckoned with two fingers, the _come here, bring that over, assist me_ motion he now expected everyone to follow – perhaps it was his demeanor, or some instinctual obedience, but people usually responded, even outside of Q-Branch. Will scuttled into the kitchen and returned with the laptop, and Q settled himself on the floor in front of the scattered components and mentally connected the wires and gears, examined the placement of pins on the microcontroller, spun two or three versions of the code he might need to control the joints of a crane.

He looked up at Will over the frame of his glasses. "Put it together."

Will fumbled for the wheel axles lying closest on the coffee table – instinctual obedience, then – but stopped himself. "What?"

Q flicked his eyes at the disassembled parts, then back at Will. "Put it together, I think I know what's wrong."

"But you haven't even looked at –"

"How much programming experience do you have?"

Will hesitated. "I took night classes for about a year. Learned a little bit of Java, Python, and Ruby –"

Q sighed through his nose. "Then I definitely know what's wrong. Put it together and I'll have it running in ten minutes."

Will dove into a cupboard in search of a screwdriver, and as Q opened the IDE he heard Kit mutter, with equal parts exasperation and amazement, "Well, he's got Will eating out of the palm of his hand – where _did_ you find him?"

Audrey wrapped herself in a blanket and flopped into the ugly armchair. "Charing Corner. He was on special. Punch your frequent-buyer card ten times and get a free espresso and a software engineer."

Ten minutes was a conservative estimate. While Will snapped the parts together, Q used the extra time to comment out and fine-tune the code, carving it down to its core. So much of what he wrote for MI6 had to be obfuscated that making something simple and open felt liberating, a communication between programmers instead of a battle.

"I have no idea what you're doing," Audrey said just behind his shoulder, and Q jumped because he hadn't felt her come so close – "but I can tell that you're good at it."

He probably would have scoffed at the compliment if it had come from anyone else. "Something like this is easy, but has attractive tangible results." They watched Will plug in the Arduino board and put the assembled robot through its paces, picking up the telly remote and a stray sock with the claw. "It's a good demonstration."

"The kids'll like it," Will said. "Any chance I could get your number in case Harry or I have questions about the code?"

Kit warned, "It's a trap," but she was smiling, and Q didn't have as many second thoughts as he should have about typing his number into the mobile Will slid across the coffee table.

"Robert's going to stay the night, if that's all right with you two," Audrey said, in a tone that conveyed just how much of a kindness she was doing them by even pretending to ask permission.

"Of course, darling, we're not completely heartless." Kit lifted a slat of the blinds and peered out at the dark, drenched street. "He'd never get a cab in this weather."

"There's not one to be had for love or money," Q muttered.

He hadn't meant for anyone but Audrey to hear, but Will's face lit up. "Oh, and he _reads_ –"

Audrey latched onto Q's arm. "He's mine, Wallace."

Will put up his hands placatingly. "Hey, I am an ardent supporter of Team Audrey. But a man can dream of finding his own tall, dark, and intellectual, right?"

Q rolled his eyes to hide how flattered he was. "I can recommend you someone. His name is Algernon. You'll have to be careful of his friend Earnest, he's a bit of a tosser."

That won him a laugh from all three of them.

"Well, I need to see this run of _Earnest_, if there's a fit Algernon," Will declared. "But since the robot's sorted, I'm going to turn in. Enjoy yourselves." He bestowed a wink on Q and Audrey that left no question about his meaning.

Kit said, "Don't be too loud, kids, I've already stayed up past my bedtime," and disappeared through a doorway down the hall. Audrey huffed and cast her eyes to the heavens.

They stood. Q took a couple of steps toward the kitchen with vague intentions of tea, but he heard the rustle of clothing and the creak of the floor and suddenly Audrey was pressed against him, face buried in the back of his shirt. "I'm sorry."

"About what?"

"There're only two of them, but somehow they manage to be drunk uncle, rambunctious cousin, and nagging grandmother all at once."

"You've never met my first flatmate," he said wryly. "I think I can handle them."

She smiled and leaned into him and they stood still for a moment, warm and alone and approaching unknown territory. When Audrey broke the embrace and slipped around him down the hall, Q's fingers twitched with the impulse to reach for her, pull her back.

At the end of the hall she pushed open a door and flicked on the lights. "My bedroom. Be there in a minute, I've got to wash off my face."

Q stepped inside, shut the door, and paused to absorb the room – smaller than his and more densely decorated, overstuffed bookshelf painted in TARDIS blue, bedraggled plants spilling from the windowsill, medical textbooks heaped on a desk next to a glowing Macbook and a vase of intricate origami flowers. The wall behind the bed was plastered floor-to-ceiling with posters of Audrey Hepburn films: _Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, My Fair Lady_. Q unknotted his tie and replaced his damp trousers with the blue-checked pajama bottoms he had hidden folded in the bottom of his bag, just in case he had had the courage or the trickery to end tonight in Audrey's flat. As he undressed, unease laid a cold hand at the base of his neck, the unmistakable prick of an unwelcome pair of eyes – Q spun round, but the door was closed and the blinds were down and there couldn't possibly be cameras, not here, he didn't even have to submit to cameras in his own flat anymore –

It took him two scans of the room to identify the source: Audrey, Kit, and Will, smiling up from a picture frame on the desk, heads together and arms around each other's shoulders. Kit's hair was pink, Audrey's much shorter; Q aged the photo at a year, maybe two. Other faces peeked out at him from unexpected places: on top of the bookshelf, Audrey and three other girls in matching plum dresses, a wedding; among the plants on the sill, a man roughly Q's age cuddling a beagle, a cousin or a friend; on the nightstand, a middle-aged couple flanked by two young redheaded men, Audrey seated in the center – her family.

The five of them together seemed crowded into the frame, but perhaps that was because Q's family had always numbered two. No, not true – a dimly-lit memory, a plain silver frame on his grandmother's nightstand, her in an awful turquoise pantsuit with her hands on a young man's shoulders, his arm in turn around the slim waist of a dark-haired woman with an infant clutched to her breast. This picture had made Q uncomfortable, because he could never view it with the reverence others expected; he did not know these people, only recognized them as his parents because he had been told. (He had no idea where the picture was now – it had disappeared during his move to London, or maybe during the auction of his grandmother's estate. Maybe a family friend had taken it from the house, or a stranger had bought it for a few pence to turn it into art. Maybe MI6 had found it and shredded it, just as they had destroyed most pieces of his past, wiped away all evidence that this dark beautiful woman had ever held their Quartermaster.)

A copy of Neruda's _One Hundred Love Sonnets_ lay on the nightstand beside the framed family. Q picked it up and sat down on the floor, back against the bed, and opened it to a place where the repeated grip of sweaty hands had begun to darken the edges of the pages. The eyes of the photographs read over his shoulder: _I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, / in secret, between the shadow and the soul._

The door creaked and Audrey slid in, wearing an old baggy T-shirt that revealed long pale legs and a hint of orange knickers. Everything about her seemed softer, somehow, bare face, bare feet, damp hair loose around her shoulders. Then she gave him a calculating look, and some of the familiar sharpness returned.

"I'd say you planned this. Unless you always carry pajama bottoms in your bag."

"Doesn't everyone?" Q asked with his best innocent expression.

"Arse," Audrey said, and kicked him, but it was really more of a nudge than a kick, and when she sat down on the floor she settled against his shoulder as though he were a permanent fixture of the room. Her fingers traced the right angles of the check, starting just above his knee and moving higher. "Tell me about this project that I'm very jealous of, since it gets to spend more time with you than I do."

But he wouldn't think of work, not when even the plastics-and-gunpowder smell of Six had started to make him feel sick and he could choose to spend his evening in the bedroom of a woman with no trousers instead. "It has to do with quantum computing. All very theoretical and the sort of thing guaranteed to put most people to sleep."

"Then we are lucky I'm not most people." She curled towards him, the length of her body pressed against his, one hand still on his thigh and the other a steady warmth against his back, their heads very close but not touching. "Go on."

Perhaps he should read the message of her touch, but for now he would trust her words and see where that took them. "I told you my focus is on software security. Most systems do a poor job of protecting their data simply because the people who use them don't want to be inconvenienced. An alphanumeric password is not an ideal way to protect sensitive information because it's too easily cracked, especially since the passwords people can easily remember, and therefore the ones they're most likely to use, are not strong passwords to begin with. And the faster computers become, the less clever they have to be, because if you're calculating at eight petaflops you can brute-force a password in a matter of minutes."

"But quantum computers are on a different level."

He was surprised to hear her speak; she had turned her face into the crook of his neck and gone still save for her fingers trailing along his pajama-leg seam. Q shifted so he could slide an arm around her and felt the muscles of her back tense at the touch, heard her draw a slow breath and let it out. Just then he knew keenly the presence of another mind, the sheer exciting unpredictability of a person; perhaps there was more than one plan at work, and he couldn't guess what form it might take, only hope.

"Yes. Theoretically it would be impossible for anyone to eavesdrop on any encryption process, because quantum systems react to any action taken against them, even observation."

"Such a small action with such significant consequences."

Her exploring fingers traveled over his hip and under the hem of his shirt, skimmed across bare skin, slid teasingly into the waistband of his pajamas. Q focused his eyes on the cupboard door and fought the temptation to squirm.

"But we're still a long way off from making quantum computers with – with practical applicability, be…cause…"

But his voice tightened and his heart rattled, sweat slicking his palms and curling his hair, because she was breathing shallow against his neck and her hand was still moving, lower and closer and – _oh_.

Q arched into her touch like a cat and let his head fall back against the mattress. "It's been bloody _years_ –"

"Mmm." She radiated smugness. In most people Q would have interpreted that as a call to battle, but as long as she kept stroking him _like_ _that_ his pride couldn't be arsed to muster. Her lips brushed his temple. "No practical applicability because – what?"

Q gave her a wild, bewildered look, cut short by a devious twist of her fingers that made him close his eyes in defense. In the darkness he heard her say, hot and close against his ear, "I'm still listening," and, oh, if it was a _game_ she wanted, she'd have it.

"Biggest problem is quantum de… decoherence, meaning the s-system loses information into, ah, the surrounding environment. All that h-helpful sensitivity works against you. But quantum physics operates on such a – a small scale, _ah_ –" His eyes fluttered open against his will, and he fixed them on an old water stain in the center of the ceiling. "– that… it's… extremely difficult to isolate a system f-from all interaction and totally prevent… degradation."

He stopped and bit down on his lip to contain the embarrassing noises clawing their way up his throat. Not that it mattered, when she could feel his every reaction, the way he rocked his hips up to meet her hand, his pulse pounding in his neck beneath the touch of her lips. He had waited much too long to do this, had actually forgotten what it was like to be drawn out and teased by another set of hands, the interplay of anticipation and denial and satisfaction.

"The… other problem is… ah… scalability. Quantum bits exist in super…p-position, so the computer needs to store – _ah_ – all possible states, the n… number of which increases exponentially –" Oh, but he was losing focus, losing control, the two things he kept on short rein at all times –

Audrey's hand stilled except for her thumb, which ran once, twice up the length of his cock and flicked teasingly over the head. "What's superposition?"

Q groaned. "An educated woman like you should know."

"Remind me."

"It's… the principle that… all… possible…" But he couldn't hold on anymore, he was shaking with it, this raw need – and Audrey tugged open his collar and licked a hot wet stripe from collarbone to jaw, caught his earlobe between her teeth and blew very gently in his ear – and he shuddered and came so hard his eyes watered, words crumbling and scattering as she stroked him through the aftershocks.

Q shoved his glasses up his forehead and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, watching points of light pinwheel across the backs of his eyelids. After a settling minute Audrey's warmth and weight left his side; he heard the floor creaking and some small objects shuffling and then she returned with the rustling of tissues as she wiped her hands clean.

Q said, behind his hands, "Do give me some warning the next time you decide to do that."

"But you perform so well under pressure."

The words landed lightly, but when her eyes flicked up from beneath her lashes it was with apology, not coyness. Q nuzzled into her hair as reassurance and for a few minutes knew an extraordinary peace, thoughts separated from self like fish behind a wall of glass, bright baubles floating to the foreground and then drifting away, to be examined or not at his leisure.

Eventually Audrey climbed up on the bed and collapsed diagonally across the mattress. "C'mere."

Q got up on his knees by the bedside and ran a hand along the inside of her leg, stopping just short of presumption. "I'd like to return the favor."

When Audrey was pleased without pretense she smiled sideways, a self-conscious crooked grin that dimpled one cheek. Obligingly she scooted closer, lifted her hips enough for him to peel off her pants and toss them aside.

After what she had done to him Q had absolutely no qualms about teasing; he trailed lips and fingers up and down her thighs, stroked the backs of her knees with his thumbs until the muscles in her legs jumped and quivered.

"Oh my _god_, Robert –"

Q watched her lazily from beneath his lashes. "I should make you explain the function of the circulatory system while I'm doing this to you."

"Keep going and I'll _show_ you."

And he could feel it, the thump of her pulse in her thigh under his fingertips, the femoral artery, a terrible way to die, even a nick and an agent could bleed out before medical arrived –

He pressed his tongue against her, inside her, to blot it all out with the slickness and the heat and the sound she made, praise and plea at once. She was already desperately wet and it only took a couple strokes of his tongue for her to drop her head against the pillows as though it had suddenly gone heavy, mouth slack and eyelids flickering. Q took his time, spreading her open, dragging the point of his tongue around but not on her clit in a way that made her whine with frustration. Finally he applied the barest hint of teeth and she bucked her hips.

"Stay still, now."

"Oh, like you weren't squirming when I had my hand down your pants –" He did it again, the thing with teeth, and she broke off with a gasp. "Squirming is… good. Squirming is a compliment."

This was something else he had forgotten about sex: the extraordinary rush of power at the other person's undoing, the way he could make her arch her back and dig in her heels with a slight scrape of fingernails, make her legs tense and then fall open by slipping off his glove and working in one finger, two. He established a rhythm, deeper and deeper, testing flicks of his tongue until he found the precise pressure that made her hand shoot out and grip the edge of the mattress, and he held her there until she was shivering, until he pressed a little bit harder and she came with a ragged breath that caught in her throat and made it out as a cry, her whole body twisting and then collapsing, limp and sated.

Q retrieved her pants and she wiggled back into them without sitting up. When he climbed onto the bed she seized a handful of his shirt and pulled him down right beside her, buried her face in the crook of his shoulder and gave a little contented hum.

"Apparently you _can_ do something with your tongue other than turn a pretty phrase."

"I'm a man of many talents." The gentle rumble of thunder reminded him. "You realize we missed an opportunity to snog in the rain."

Audrey snickered. "And we didn't even have tea to make up for it. Poor boy, I'm depriving you."

They lay together with their legs tangled and their heads on the same pillow, the wash of rain the only sound. Audrey's fingers brushed his fringe back and traced the lines of his face with a musician's precision, along his eyebrow and round the curve of his ear, scraping the pad of her thumb the wrong way against the stubble on his jaw. After a minute her smile faded and her eyes began to drift.

"You're thinking about something," Q said.

"I'm always thinking about something."

"You're thinking about something that I remind you of, if only tangentially, so I think my curiosity is inevitable and justified."

She sighed. Her hand slowed and then stilled in the middle of its circuit, like a car running out of petrol, fingertips resting brush-light at the corner of his jaw. For a minute, silence; then she laughed with no pleasant humor, the kind of laugh that came because it was better than crying. "I was thinking about my ex-boyfriend."

Q's eyebrows lifted in surprise – he had been too concerned about what she thought of him, if his lack of practice would disappoint, if she would ask, finally, about the gloves and why he was rumpling his dress shirt by wearing it to sleep, and she hadn't been thinking of him at all –

"Exactly what every man wants to hear after intimacy, right? I can't believe I –" She broke off, rolled her head away and stared unseeing at the ceiling. Her eyes glimmered with a sheen of damp.

Finally she whispered, as if speaking to herself, "Funny, isn't it, that you think you've reached a point where you can talk about something calmly, and it almost seems like it happened to you in another life, and then you open your mouth and all your confidence is gone."

"You're not required to explain anything."

She shook her head ungracefully, urgently. "I want to. I put off bringing you here for so long because I was afraid. That it would turn out the same way as with… him. If you came over then it'd be real, you know, we'd be sleeping together and you'd know my flatmates and my parents would want to meet you next time they're in town –"

Now Q was the one to turn his head away in pursuit of a thought: most of his relationships had been in the early years of uni, when everyone was exercising their newfound freedom to date without their parents' knowledge or approval, and aside from one awkward dinner where he had been introduced as "a friend," he had never met his partners' families and never considered that strange. It had seemed reciprocal – he had no family to show them, and avoidance was much easier than explanation.

But Audrey would rather confront the truth than lie or hide.

"My ex and I started dating when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-nine. A mutual friend introduced us at a party and right away we were mad about each other. We ignored everyone else all night long and sat in a corner of the kitchen drinking cocktail after cocktail and talking about everything. I don't believe in destiny or soulmates or any of those romantic tropes, but it really feels like magic when you meet someone who makes you feel confident and sexy and fascinating from the first instant – when you catch fire." She looked at him with a silent question, a request for validation; Q gave it with a nod, and she pressed on. "We went on our first date two days later and after that we were together all the time. My friends were excited for me, and I met his family and they adored me, and everything was lovely.

"But over time I was less and less happy and I couldn't figure out why. I had started to notice things about him that bothered me, but I thought that was just the downside of a long relationship, you know, learning to put up with the other person's flaws. He was quite the lad's lad –" Q rolled his eyes and she said, "I know, before I met him I would have made that same face. He liked to get really pissed with the same pack of mates and when he brought me along it was like I was window-dressing. Once Will came with us to the pub, and my ex cracked some awful joke about how my tits were worth more than the GDP of a small country, and Will made such a scene in my defense that he got us thrown out of the pub."

"I knew there was good in him, he's a maker," Q said, with what he hoped was a comforting measure of warmth. Audrey smiled, thin but sincere, and shifted closer so she could rest her head against his chest.

"After that I had a huge row with each of them. My ex told me I was being too sensitive, and he would never have said it if he hadn't been pissed, and he was sorry he had hurt me but I really needed to calm down. Will said that he couldn't believe I was dating such a git, and if we went out again it would be without my boyfriend around. Of course, that just made me angrier, because by that point I didn't go anywhere without him. He would get very suspicious if I wanted to go somewhere alone, or with just me and my friends. Quite a few of my friends had stopped inviting me out anyway, because they knew I'd bring him and they didn't want that. And I… I just didn't understand what was so wrong, because yeah, he was a dick some of the time, but I couldn't believe that someone who cried at the end of _The Notebook_ and had so many smart things to say about Foucault could be a bad person.

"After two years we decided that when my lease ran out on my flat, I'd move in with him. He lives right near St. Thomas's, and I had just found out I was going to do my foundation there, so it seemed perfect. I had everything packed in boxes in my bedroom and the term was almost over and every night I would sit on my bed and feel like crying.

"The day before my graduation, we went shopping because my mum insisted I needed a new dress for my graduation dinner. He was in a silly mood, and I tried on so many outfits that I would never think of buying so he and I could make fun of them, and it was just like the beginning of our relationship, when we were so playful with each other. Then I picked out a dress, and –" Her voice darkened. "– after I paid he told me I should go back into the dressing room and put it on, and he'd sneak in after me and take it off."

Q started to sit up, instinctively, but she had curled tight against him and he felt her tense when he moved, as though she were torn between a polite desire to let him up and a less rational desire to make him stay. And Q had once been the one to tell this type of story, so he lay back the way they had been arranged before, to give her the attention that she needed more than indignation.

She gave a fortifying sigh. "He was really into it, having sex in places where we might get caught, even though I'd told him over and over again that it made me uncomfortable. He'd talked me into giving him a handjob in the back of a taxi once. I did it because I was just relieved he hadn't asked for a blowjob.

"When he started to carry on about the dressing room, I told him flat out that I was not going to get arrested just so he could get off. He tried to argue, and I walked out of the store. He followed me for four blocks before I was able to hail a taxi and go home. I sat up all night wondering if he was going to show up at my flat and being afraid of what might happen if he did. And being afraid made me angry, because I shouldn't have been afraid, he shouldn't have had that power over me. The next morning I called him and told him it was over."

Q's eyebrows knitted in grim recognition. "He didn't go quietly, did he?"

"Fuck no. He rang me so many times over the next week that I had to change my number. I actually still have audio files of some of the last voicemails he left me, just in case he ever shows up again and I need to get a non-molestation order."

She scrubbed her palms over her face as though telling the story had made her feel unclean. "You must think I was absolutely mad. I feel like I've done a bad job explaining what made him so attractive in the first place. Because on good days he was very attractive."

"And because you have those good days," Q muttered, half to himself, "you're not really sure if the bad days are all in your head. You almost want them to be, because then the problem would be closer to your control."

Audrey lifted her head and examined him, brow furrowed in realization and concern and stifled relief at his understanding. Q couldn't look at her, couldn't absorb her emotions when he barely had command of his. He had gone years without acknowledging this part of his past, and six months ago he would never have guessed he would confess it twice.

"My first flatmate was the same kind of viper. Clever, charming, and absolutely devoid of any real regard for anyone except himself. I knew enough about him early on that I could have seen through him, if I had been clear-headed. But I held on to the few good things he did for me, and I sold myself a fiction of his genuine friendship, because I wanted it to be true."

"At least you didn't sleep with him," Audrey muttered, her face gentle, nimble fingers creasing his collar. Then she froze; her eyes snapped back to his face. "Did you?"

"No. He's aggressively heterosexual, and I'm particular about my partners. Although…" And the words tumbled out before he could stop them, the name of a fear he had never admitted: "…I am sometimes afraid of what would have happened if he had decided that was something he wanted."

Audrey ducked her head against his shoulder and lay unnaturally still, like an animal hiding in plain sight. Then he felt her nod, slowly and thoughtfully, and he knew that she understood the real fear: not of force but of subtlety, an insidious conditioning, the brick-by-brick dismantling of self-trust until he reached outside to grasp something reliable. But whatever anchor he found would crumble to rust and set him adrift and only then would he realize how he had been lured.

She moved suddenly as though she were getting up, and for a flash Q thought he had misjudged her sympathy. But she kissed him instead, hard and reassuring and grateful, the kind of kiss that both relaxed and lit him, and he thought of the way she had described attraction: _when you catch fire_. Something beautiful and natural and dangerous, mythologized so completely it was difficult to recognize in real life.

When they broke apart her eyes were still damp, but she was smiling, and Q supposed he was, too. Audrey pulled the blanket over them and settled against his side, face half-buried in the pillow, one pale-lashed eye occasionally winking open as if to check that he was still there. They did not need to speak.

After a while her breathing slowed, and Q reached up and turned out the light.

* * *

He dozed, off and on. He had left his mobile in his bag in an unreachable corner, but the clock on Audrey's desk counted the sleepless minutes for him, squared green numbers reflected curving and disproportionate in the vase like a funhouse mirror.

He should have known he would not be able to sleep no matter how well the night went, not in an unfamiliar space with sheets that smelled of Audrey, lights rippling past the curtains in an unsolved pattern, the building creaking and settling with little pops that jerked him alert like gunfire. At two a.m. someone – probably Will, from the heaviness of the footsteps – got up and used the toilet across the hallway, and suddenly Q's nerves burned with the knowledge that they were not alone, that only thin walls and an unlocked door isolated them from others who could let in even more. Once he had spent every night like this, awake with a creeping dread of the monster in the other room, a dread made more powerful by how weak it appeared in the light of day.

Eventually he gave up on sleep and slid gently out of bed. Audrey rolled over but did not wake. She looked so vulnerable that for a minute he considered the wisdom of leaving her alone – but he was not sure, in the end, if he would be able to protect her, if his presence might not be the most dangerous thing.

In the kitchen he found a tumbler in a cabinet of jumbled dishes and filled it with water from the tap, sat at the table with only his mobile and the light above the sink for company, and watched condensation slick the glass like sweat.

Audrey found him when the glass was half-empty.

"You all right?" She hugged herself, blinking languidly, shirt hanging low off one shoulder.

Q nodded and took another drink because it gave him an excuse not to answer aloud.

She didn't believe him. "Care for that tea?"

He had tried that before, of course, tried drinking tea and not drinking tea and making the tea without drinking it so the smell would soak his flat and any other number of folk remedies where doctors and pills had failed him. "Why not," he said tonelessly, and hoped too late that she wouldn't perceive that as ingratitude.

Audrey tiptoed across the kitchen, opened cabinets gently, ran the water low. Q knew she was doing it so not to wake her flatmates, but the care and the hush reminded him of hospitals and breakable things.

When she had the kettle on, she set out two mugs and leaned against the counter instead of coming close.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Q had been tracing a well-worn path through the maze of his mind, the kind where even the missteps and wrong turns felt weary with familiarity. When he followed the chain of his failures he always wound up in the same place. After the inquiry he had resolved not to speak of it, because they had made him repeat his deposition until he knew it by heart, like a schoolboy punished with lines, and there was nothing left to be said. Except, except – he wanted to grow the infant trust between them, had already shown her one wound on his heart just as she had shown him hers, and right now he could not bear another night shuttered with this.

"Last year," he began, "one of my colleagues died while she was… out… on a – a business trip." Audrey looked briefly surprised at the unexpected subject, but she stood patient as he measured his words. "It was… a series of stupid decisions on several people's parts, including mine. We sent her to a place we knew might not be safe, and she didn't come back. I have a lot of… questions. And regrets."

The skin around Audrey's eyes tensed. "Have you thought about seeing –"

"Please don't suggest I get a therapist, that's the one thing frightening enough to give me nightmares."

He had meant that as a joke, or at least he had meant to bury the truth beneath a layer of flippancy, but she knew him too well to be satisfied with what was on the surface.

"I'm not brushing you off," she said, her tone hinting that he should show her the same courtesy. "This is a bit above the scope of my practice."

But now that he had given himself permission to explain, he couldn't seem to stop, pressing on against her interjections and his own half-conscious protests, _too much, too soon_ –

"You don't know what it's like, when someone else's life can be pinned on you, when you make choices and they have to suffer the consequences –"

"Robert –"

"– and you'll have to live with the judgment of everyone around you, the judgment of _strangers_, even though _they_ couldn't have done any better in your situation –"

"_Robert_ –"

"– and the worst part is you failed that person when they needed you, when someone who didn't usually ask for help sought you out and _trusted_ you – I don't know if anyone can _possibly_ understand wh –"

"Stop and _think_ for a minute, Robert!"

He had seen her angry, but never like this. She vibrated with it, hands clenched to hide their trembling, a flush staining the tense muscles of her throat. Realization struck him like a lance: pictures on the fridge from her graduation, magnets shaped like stethoscopes and reflex hammers, the schedule from St. Thomas's tacked to the corkboard, _the scope of my practice_ and _someone else's life pinned on you_ and oh, he was so bloody _stupid_ –

His mobile buzzed. Q's hands had already picked it up and unlocked the screen before his mind reminded him that this wasn't the proper response, that in front of him was a person who needed his attention more than his masters did, and Colin's smirk flashed behind his eyes: _They have trained you well._

Tanner. Some mission gone wrong in Korea. Very few details, because it wasn't secure, and because they already knew he'd come when called.

"I have to go."

Audrey glanced at the clock on the microwave. "It's four in the morning."

Her frown had become bewildered, and for an instant he felt relieved – but some dark bitter ghost in his head wanted her anger instead, because it aligned with his expectations and his history and his unadmitted convictions about what he deserved.

"I have to go," he repeated, firmly, and she didn't argue.

She followed him to her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed while he put his trousers on, hands tucked beneath her legs and shoulders drawn forward in a way that made her look young and scared. Silence stood between them like a pane of glass. When he walked out she didn't move, at first, but as he wrenched open the front door and stepped into the hallway he thought he saw a flutter of red hair appear against the white walls on the far side of the living room. Through the hush he heard the door open even from the bottom of the stairs, heard her call after him, once, "Robert –"

Q thought he was justified in not answering, because after all that wasn't his name.

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

Chapter title comes from "Fire" by Delta Rae.

"_Omega level – that's the highest level of clearance."_

"But, Wolf," you say, "isn't omega the last letter of the Greek alphabet?" Yes, yes it is – but omega also represents the null value in Structured Query Language (SQL), a data-management programming language. Null does not mean zero – it means the value is unknown or does not exist in the database. Appropriate, I thought, for the data MI6 would publicly deny.

"_My BND meeting is in five minutes…"_

BND is short for Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German foreign intelligence agency.

"_William Wallace, not to be confused with the historical figure."_

Though Will is named after that guy from _Braveheart_, my inspiration was Wallace Wells, the alliteratively-named, boyfriend-stealing roommate from _Scott Pilgrim_. Somehow Will ended up as a kinder, more sincere puppy-dog of a man.

_His gaze had caught a clutter of machinery on the coffee table, wheels and pulleys and an Arduino board winking light like a precious stone. / as Q opened the IDE_

An Arduino board is a customizable microcontroller – basically a simple computer on a single circuit board – that you can program to execute a wide variety of tasks. Makers (DIY-ers with a focus on engineering) use Arduino for everything from talking clocks to motion sensors to LED light displays. IDE stands for integrated development environment, a software application used to write programs.

"_Will, stop hiding, Eliza's brought her Freddy." / "There's not one to be had for love or money," Q muttered. _

I've been sneaking lots of references to _Pygmalion_/_My Fair Lady_ into this story, for no other reason than I'm the Author and I Do What I Want. Although the rewritten ending of _My Fair Lady_ gives a lot of people the impression that Eliza and Higgins are the main romantic pairing, the real romance is between Eliza and Freddy – hence Q quotes Freddy's line about the difficulties of getting a cab in the rain. Originally Q and Audrey were going to attend a performance of _Pygmalion_, but then I remembered that _The Importance of Being Earnest_ is about men who conceal their identities from the women they are romancing.

_I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, / in secret, between the shadow and the soul._

This is Neruda's Sonnet XVII, perhaps more famous for the lines, "I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; / so I love you because I know no other way."


End file.
